Farmers have influence if they stick together

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/01/2021 (1689 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s been interesting to watch how Western Canada’s grain industry has sorted itself out since the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) lost its single desk status and was privatized nearly a decade ago.

The bitter, long-drawn out debate leading up to it was dominated by the question of whether farmers would do better marketing their own grain as individuals rather than through a government-mandated single desk.

However, besides its role selling grain, the CWB loomed large in almost every part of the cereal value chain, from research and development, to producer advocacy, to market development to customer service.

It was hard to foresee what, if anything, would replace those functions.

The board is now long gone, and while the answer to the marketing debate will forever remain hotly contested, most accept that it’s moot — because it won’t be coming back.

The only lingering loose end is a lawsuit slowly making its way through the courts. The Friends of the Canadian Wheat Board have given up challenging the federal government’s right to make the decision it did, but not their claim that the government had no right to finance the transfer of the board to private hands using farmers’ money.

They say Prairie farmers are owed approximately $190 million in compensation and damages because funds the board earned from selling farmers’ grain were used to convert the CWB into a private grain company partly owned by the Saudi Arabian government.

That effort was bolstered recently by the Manitoba Court of Appeal, which overruled a lower court ruling quashing the claim.

Aside from all that, the farmers and the industry have faced some tough adjustments in the aftermath of the board’s demise.

While some saw it as meddling, others saw the board as a powerful force holding the industry accountable to producers.

Many feared the farmer’s voice would become splintered and weakened, especially since the farmer-owned co-ops that once dominated grain handling, farm supply and domestic processing had also disappeared.

More than a few speculated farmers were right back to where they were just over a century ago before they organized and exerted their collective power by building an empire that, at one time, controlled 83 per cent of the grain handling.

Many of the commodity’s commissions that surfaced over the past 20 years tended, at least initially, to be singularly focused on one commodity. So there was a tremendous amount of competition for farmers’ checkoff dollars and a worry that research would be conducted in silos that failed to factor in the integrated nature of Prairie grain production.

There’s also the real risk that farmers would react to the multiple hands dipping into their pockets by simply checking out — because all of these checkoffs are voluntary.

What’s emerged, however, is anything but a return to the bad old days when farmers were at the mercy of the big industry players.

It has taken time and hard talking to figure out the logistics. But there are some powerful collaborations emerging that harness both the efficiencies of scale and the amplification of many voices speaking as one.

For example, the Manitoba Crop Alliance was formed last year from an amalgamation of five Manitoba commodity groups: Manitoba Wheat and Barley Growers Association, Manitoba Corn Growers Association, National Sunflower Association of Canada, Manitoba Flax Growers Association and Winter Cereals Manitoba Inc.

When it comes to wheat breeding research, it has joined with wheat commissions in Alberta and Saskatchewan to form the Canadian Wheat Research Coalition, which is now overseeing the direction of wheat research by Agriculture and AgriFood Canada.

These collaborations are both formal and fluid in shape, sometimes coalescing around common service needs and other times around common positions on issues.

But they share little in common with the past, when farmer collaborations such as the co-ops were more about small-C capitalism and achieving power by actually owning a chunk of the value chain.

Farmers of today have realized they don’t need to own it to have influence over it — as long as they stick together.

Laura Rance is vice-president of Content for Glacier FarmMedia. She can be reached at lrance@farmmedia.com