Argentina moves to protect its wheat farmers
Readers may know that only four countries consistently produce grain for sale in international markets: the US, Canada, Australia, and Argentina. Yesterday Reuters reported that Argentina will be denying export permits to the international grain oligopoly (the so-called ABCD group) because they are not paying Argentinean grain producers a fair share of the world price. Argentina’s Economy...
Read MoreLooking back on 2014
(January 6, 2015) 2014 has to rank as the year where everything has gone wrong for Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz and his followers. They promised an era of transparency, freedom, competition, profitability, and efficiency for western Canada’s grain farms hitherto never seen. EVOLUTION DENIED What Ritz and his cohorts regarded as stuffy bastions of red tape like the Canadian Wheat Board, the...
Read MoreChaos at Port
Turning the coyotes loose (Feb 4, 2014) A few days ago a friend asked me why most of the media stories about the chaos in grain shipping at the west coast failed to mention the end of the single desk farmer-controlled Canadian Wheat Board. As in any system with a lot of moving parts, one failure often leads to another. Ottawa killing the single desk Wheat Board has removed one of the very few...
Read MoreU.N. declares 2014 the year of family farming
The United Nations – Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) has proclaimed 2014 the year of family farming. Their web site mentions the importance of access to markets and even cooperatives, but nothing about the importance of marketing boards for providing that access to family farms. Proclamations like this from the UN and others about family farms disregard the fundamental reality that...
Read MoreThe Ostrich of Ottawa
(December 31, 2013) This month Minister Ritz continued to claim western farmers were being frivolous to expect compensation for the assets of the Canadian Wheat Board they bought and paid for. Who does he think he is fooling? Certainly not farmers. It was fifty years ago that the Canadian Wheat Board moved into its new building at 425 Main in downtown Winnipeg. At the time the CWB...
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