Western Producer staff
Maybe it was the New Orleans tradition of Southern hospitality. Maybe it was embarrassment over the excessive and downright nasty rhetoric of a year ago.
Or it could have been a feeling that everything that can be said has been said, and now it’s time to sit back and await the outcome?
Whatever the reason, the reception accorded Canadians attending the 1994 convention of the U.S. National Association of Wheat Growers was noticeably friendlier than a year earlier.
Of course, that wouldn’t take much. The unofficial theme of the 1993 convention in Anaheim, Calif., was “Let’s Bash Canada.” Speaker after speaker, from politicians to grain marketers to individual farmers, accused Canada of a variety of nefarious and underhanded tactics used to steal away markets that rightfully belonged to U.S. wheat farmers.
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“Americans will no longer take Canadian cheating sitting down,” declared hyperbolic Montana senator Max Baucus during last year’s meeting.
At one point, Canadians were even kicked out of part of the meeting at which grain trade issues were being discussed.
One might have expected even worse when U.S. wheat growers gathered in New Orleans two weeks ago for this year’s convention, given the high level of wheat trade tensions between Canada and the U.S. in recent months.
But much to the surprise of the 15 or so Canadians in attendance, the harsh (and, it must be admitted, somewhat entertaining) rhetoric and confrontational atmosphere was largely missing during the three-day meeting of more than 1,000 wheat farmers and industry officials.
That’s not to say the members of this influential Washington-based lobby group have modified their views. They still believe Canada is an unfair competitor and passed numerous policy resolutions to that effect. And any conversation with a U.S. wheat grower invariably turned into a debate about Canadian Wheat Board pricing practices, Crow subsidies, the Export Enhancement Program and unfair trade barriers.
As Richard Groundwater of the Canadian Grain Commission put it: “One thing I’ve learned down here is how hard it is to get across a logical argument.”
Nevertheless, during the convention’s public sessions, and in a closed-door “international forum” involving representatives from the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia and Mexico, the atmosphere was generally low-key, restrained and respectful.
One reason may have been that talkative border-state politicians like Baucus, who don’t let facts get in the way of a good speech, were absent from this year’s meeting. But even Winston Wilson, the sometimes bombastic president of the trade promotion group U.S. Wheat Associates, bit his tongue when it came to Canada.
A year ago, his speech to the convention was mainly a diatribe against Canadian grain marketing practices. This year he presented a reasoned discussion of world trade issues and made only passing reference to the wheat war with the northern neighbor.
“That was the best speech I’ve ever heard him give,” said a somewhat surprised Hubert Esquirol of the Western Canadians Wheat Growers Association.
Besides the wheat growers, the Canadian contingent at this year’s NAWG meeting included representatives from Prairie Pools Inc., the wheat board and grain commission, the Grain Transportation Agency, the railways and the federal and Saskatchewan governments.
Doug Campbell, president of the Canada Grains Council and the grain industry’s chief liaison with Ottawa on the U.S. wheat trade issue, said the government and the industry take seriously the value of travelling to the U.S. to meet face to face with farmers and leaders.
For example, since the summer he has been involved in dozens of meetings in Washington and visited 14 state wheat commissioners. The council is also putting together a speakers’ bureau of Canadians available to travel south of the border to present this country’s point of view. And while it’s hard to get the Canadian grain industry to agree on much at home, there has been excellent co-operation in dealing with the U.S. trade issue.
“Instead of Canadians standing up with three different views on every issue, we are knitting together and we’re agreeing to bury our differences on the north side of the border before we come and talk to them,” Campbell said in an interview.
But he also expressed frustration that the information that gets out to U.S. farmers is filtered through the leaders of organizations like NAWG. He had hoped to be on the agenda at this year’s convention to speak directly to delegates, but was dropped at the last minute.
He said Canadians face lots of obstacles as they try to explain and defend their position. For example, the U.S. system gives every state two senators, including small states like Montana, North Dakota and Minnesota that have a particular interest in wheat trade issues: “They get heard in Washington and they’re played quite frequently in the media, so in a relative sense they’re got a lot of clout.”
In addition, the new administration seems particularly anxious to oil squeaky wheels like the NAWG in order to win support on issues like North American free trade, the budget and health care. And undersecretary of agriculture Gene Moos, the administration’s key adviser on grain issues and a former president of NAWG, is an “unabashed and unapologetic promoter of the U.S. wheat growers’ interests.”
Perhaps the biggest problem of all is simply the Americans’ attitude that any time a competitor beats them in selling a product to a particular market, that competitor must be cheating.
“The information that gets out to U.S. farmers is filtered through the leaders of organizations like NAWG.”
“It’s not working, Mona. Put your clothes back on and we’ll try something different.”
