This is a great read, with the Quebec Liberal Robillard Report calling for huge cuts to farmers income stabilization (basically making family farming unsustainable), the need for the Wheat Board has been proven by the failure of the open market: ...the dismantling of the CWB was presented to the general public as a gift to farmers, but...it wasn’t a gift the farmers—who owned the Board—actually wanted. “The Wheat Board ran many polls over the years, with a large majority of farmers supporting the old single-desk system. The government spent two years spouting inflammatory rhetoric, and tried to prevent the CWB from holding a final plebiscite on the issue.”... it’s difficult for smaller farmers to do their own marketing and financing. It’s not more freedom for farmers. It’s freedom for the people higher up in the system.” ...exhilaration soon turned to dismay as farmers tried to capitalize on their good fortune. Canada produces the best wheat in the world, and the 2013 harvest was potentially worth between $6 billion and $9 billion on the open market. But when it came to buying the wheat and delivering it overseas, the privatized marketing chain seemed paralyzed with incompetence. Overloaded elevators stopped taking delivery of wheat, and not just because of an overabundance of product—trains were unavailable. Flotillas of empty ships sat at anchor in Vancouver’s English Bay with their meters running, waiting for weeks for wheat that never arrived. Cash-strapped farmers were forced to buy storage bins at $60,000 apiece to keep their crop from rotting. When farmers found an elevator that would take their grain, some got half the money they received under the CWB, and were charged twice as much to ship it. So were these the long-awaited rewards of marketing freedom? Weren’t these the same problems that prompted the federal government to create the Wheat Board in the first place? Compare that to what the CWB gave farmers: The Wheat Board became the sole purchaser of western wheat, and the myriad private elevators and wheat pools became its field agents. Controlling the crop, the Board was the de facto manager of the transportation and terminal system. The CWB’s mandate was to pay farmers a base price for their grain, identify markets, negotiate the best price, deliver the goods, issue advance cheques and make final payment after the crop was sold. If the wheat market went up, farmers pocketed the profits. If the market went down, the government absorbed the loss. Nothing was subtracted from the farmer’s share except the cost of marketing and delivery. In 2011-12, the Board sold $7.2-billion worth of grain to more than 70 countries, $4.9 billion of which was paid back to farmers—the third-highest sales year for wheat in its history.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 21:18:35 +0000
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