There is a good reason why the plebiscite ballot going out in the mail now to barley producers does not have a “dual market” option – there is not and cannot be any such viable option in real life.
The choice is between having a central selling agency with a monopoly on supplies of malting barley and export barley, or leaving farmers to sell to anyone they want.
There is no middle ground between those principles, no way to have the best of both worlds. By restricting the plebiscite options, federal agriculture minister Ralph Goodale is quite properly asking them to make a clear choice on the basic principle.
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Could the Canadian Wheat Board survive in some form without its export monopoly? It would undoubtedly keep operating for some period, in much-changed form. But prospects for longer-term health would be poor.
First, an anti-board result in the barley plebiscite would likely lead to the same forces soon taking away the board’s jurisdiction over wheat.
Then, if the board attempted to continue as an agency where farmers could voluntarily pool their grain, it would run head-first into competition from all the existing elevator companies.
Instead of working as board agents in efficiently buying and transporting grain, these companies would be compelled to compete with the board for grain. Without its own elevator system, how could the board find space for its own purchases, let alone try to give farmers across the Prairies fair delivery opportunities?
Some have suggested that farmers could make individual long-term commitments to either the board or the open market. But that administrative nightmare would not remove the basic problems.
Even if some type of unbreakable individual contracts were in place, requiring 80 percent of farmers to deliver all their grain to the board, the grain companies buying from the other 20 percent would give it priority for available space and transportation.
Meanwhile, overseas the lack of guaranteed supply would hamper the board making sales in premium markets and would discourage long-term market development. The private companies that won the premium sales would enjoy the extra profits, which would no longer be available for pooling among farmers.
Also, if 20 percent of Canadian wheat found its way into export markets, the premium markets could disappear. No longer would there be one supplier of high-quality Canadian wheat. Canadian farmers would in effect be competing against themselves to see who could get such sales at the lowest price.
