The Canadian grain industry is getting all choked up – by a legion of trade barriers.
At a session this morning at the Canada Grains Council’s 41st annual meeting here in Winnipeg the bewildering number of trade blockages facing Canadian crops was made pretty obvious by a panel of commodity representatives:
1) Canola’s still mostly blocked from the Chinese market. A little more than 100,000 tonnes per month is tricking into the giant market, which sounds good, but it should be far higher. In this case the blockage is due to China’s supposed fear of blackleg breaking out of the port and attacking Chinese rapeseed plants. Fortunately, the Chinese are abiding by the rules they set that allow canola to be landed in ports that are in provinces that don’t grow rapeseed.
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2) Flax: Flax is mostly blocked from the European Union. I say “mostly” because some of the booming American exports to the EU probably contain Canadian flax as do flax products from China. In this case, as we all well know, the EU’s impossible-to-meet genetically-modified crop restrictions and unexpected presence of minute quantities of Triffid flax in Canadian shipments are to blame.
3) Canadian GM-free soybeans: there was a problem last year when non-GM soybeans from the U.S. going to Europe ended up being slightly GMy, just like flax. But in that case the Europeans scrambled to approve the two GM events that threatened shipments and so shipments can continue and tolerances among non-GM shipments have been raised.
4) Pulses: There aren’t the same types of present calamities with pulses, but heavy metal content (I’m not talking here about Iron Maiden, Megadeth or Metallica, but the stuff that comes out of the ground), mycotoxins and tiny amounts of GM presence in crops like mustard could be used in places like India to block access. Selenium has been used before to block Canadian pulses.
All in all, there’s a pretty scary trade picture out there . . . in some ways. Lots of problems and snags, but lots of sales and trade too. As with canola, which is moving briskly and which is still profitable, some of the problems are proving to be more of a bother than a crippling problem.
Some council members played with Shakespeare’s line about “the winter of our discontents,” wondering whether this would be the “spring of resolutions.” But no one at the meeting seemed to feel that trade was about to enter a golden new age of untroubled access.
