Harper hoping WTO kills wheat board for him

"We'll continue to fight in Parliament... But the bottom line is this. Mark my words. Western Canadian farmers want this freedom (an open market) and they are going to get it. And anybody who stands in their way is going to get walked over."

Harper's boots just changed feet. Last Tuesday, the results of the CWB's second biennial director elections were announced. Four of the five victorious candidates -- and eight of the 10 farmer-elected directors -- back the state trading enterprise's single desk.

The prime minister should be humbled by, and listen to, this resounding democratic verdict. He and his party have been making much lately of their devotion to democracy to discredit the Liberal-NDP coalition supported by the Bloc Québécois and, more recently, to discredit Michael Ignatieff's accession to the Liberal leadership through a "closed-door" vote by caucus and party officials.

Harper has an out. He can abandon his dirty tricks campaign against the CWB and still "walk over" democracy by turning to the World Trade Organization. The WTO's Doha Round, if it survives, is more than prepared to dispatch the pesky marketing agency for him.

The day after the CWB director elections, Crawford Falconer, New Zealand's WTO ambassador and agricultural chair, released a new text that would declare the CWB illegal in 2013, the deadline for a new agreement.

The CWB is isolated at the WTO. The former Australian government abolished the world's only other single-desk wheat board. And the WTO draft text contains a footnote exempting New Zealand's kiwi fruit exporting agency from the CWB's fate.

Dustin Gosnell, the CWB's director of strategic planning and corporate policy, says the WTO "is one step closer to cementing language that would cause us to lose the single desk and how it's happening is really most discouraging. It's really the chair railroading it through."

National Farmers Union president Stewart Wells says the WTO is a "most undemocratic organization." Canada isn't even in most of the meetings involving agriculture. They are dominated by the U.S., European Union, Argentina and Brazil.

Driven by multinational agribusiness giants Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, ConAgra and Louis Dreyfus, the U.S. has laid 14 unfair-trading complaints before international trade panels against the CWB over the past two decades and lost every one.

Its last loss was 2004, when all U.S. complaints were dismissed. So the U.S. simply went to the WTO and got the rules changed, continued Wells in an interview. "By definition, the board is outlawed, regardless of its trading practices."

Wells says the "ABCD" of world food production control virtually all food exports around the globe -- "everything that comes onto your plate, even chocolate" -- and they wield the real power at international trade talks. "The CWB handles $7 billion annually. These companies know that if the wheat board is gone they will handle that $7 billion and be able to skim off a bit for themselves."

He calls the WTO "the next best opportunity for the Harper government to destroy the wheat board and we've got to make sure they don't do it."

Historically, Canada's position on the CWB at international trade talks has been that the future of the single desk is a decision for Canadian farmers to make in Canada.

Under Harper, that's now history. Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz has said the government will fight to preserve Canada's supply-management system. But he has been silent about the CWB.

Jeff Nielsen, the one "choice" director elected last week, told the Red Deer Advocate that it's just a matter of time before board "reform" occurs. "It may not be the government of Canada that does it, it may be the WTO trade talks that do it..."

Harper has had the CWB in his crosshairs since he was president of the far-right National Citizens' Coalition. As prime minister, he has fired its CEO, Adrian Measner, imposed a "gag order" on the board and its members from defending the single desk, twice arbitrarily stripped farmers' names from the CWB directors' voting lists, violated the prohibitions against third-party advertising during director elections and tried to violate the federal Privacy Act by allowing his minister to pressure the board to hand over farmers' confidential financial information.

Three times in 11 months, a federal court has found that the government has broken Canadian laws in its ongoing anti-democratic and demagogic attacks on the CWB.

The Harper Conservatives hate the CWB because it violates their neo-conservative determination to reduce governments to insignificance in favour of globalized business, the driving force behind all so-called free-trade agreements.

These trade deals are the "economic constitutions" responsible for creating today's global economic crisis. Why? Because they hollow out economies and abolish stable employment and lifestyles for people around the planet.

Frances Russell is a Winnipeg-based freelance journalist and author.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 17, 2008 A15