Milling & Baking News - October 18, 2011 - 7

Last chapter for Canadian Wheat Board
o experiment with governmental parti- prices on the world market produced a superior cipation in the functioning of the wheat return. If not realized in prices, later payments were market has had a longer life than the made from the profits, if any, achieved for a specific Canadian Wheat Board. As the sole, legal purchaser crop season. A desire to improve grower returns of wheat produced in the three Canadian prairie and thus to beat the system offering farmers only a provinces since 1935, the Board will have had 77 market into which to sell meant that the Board found years to prove to Canadian farmers and tax-paying itself taking chances, while overriding the private Canadians whether such a system was positive for trade. Negotiations sometimes resulted in fixing all those the system purportedly served. That a quantities and even prices over a period of years, Conservative majority government, elected in part giving the Board considerable power over global on the plank of ending the C.W.B., was expected to prices in those periods when major buyers were bring this to a close next August goes a long way single countries like the Former Soviet Union and to understanding how this has happened. Like the China. They had to deal with the Board as the single experiences of other countries where the public has seller of Canadian wheat and barley. sway, a shift to conservative, or less liberal, forms has Because of its importance in the prairies and across been felt along the entire food chain. It is in Canada Canada, the Board’s leaders exerted much influence where the most dramatic shift is under way. on the nation’s direction, economically and politically. Established at the depths of the Great Depression, Board chief executives were often leading figures in a time when farmers around the world suffered from global negotiations not just having to do with grain extremely depressed prices, but with relations in general. Like the experiences of other the C.W.B.’s origins were It’s hardly necessary to look countries where the public has often traced to the European sway, a shift to conservative, or less beyond the role the C.W.B. socialist backgrounds of had as a supplier of Canadian liberal, forms has been felt along many of the nations from wheat to both the F.S.U. and to the entire food chain. which Canadian farm famChina to recognize the Board’s ilies had emigrated. Canada went considerably hand in giving world grain trade such great influence further than the United States in establishing an over both global trade and politics. agency like the Board with such complete controls It is the disappearance of many leading single over how wheat was going to be marketed. In the country buyers, the C.W.B.’s increasing reliance U.S. for example, farmers through the same period on prices set by open markets and the success of as the C.W.B. existed could sell their wheat and other systems, all reinforced by the trend toward other grains to whatever buyer they chose, with lesser governmental powers, that have combined government supports for prices mainly by the crop to bring the Board to shutdown. Few doubt that loan program. Defaults under this program often prairie farmers will find much to enjoy in being resulted in the Commodity Credit Corp. controlling able to sell to a range of buyers and having to deal a large quantity of U.S. wheat or other grains, but with a functioning, not static, wheat market. After C.C.C. acquisition and selling policies were designed so many years, the Board’s disappearance will create to avoid conflicts with private merchants. a vacuum. But the great ability of grain markets to The Canadian Wheat Board operated very adjust efficiently to so much over the years spurs differently. Each year it set an “initial” price for confidence that writing finis to the Canadian Wheat Canadian wheat, and this return was guaranteed by Board just concludes another chapter in the wonderful the government. Upward changes in initial prices history of prospering and expanding global were limited to increases in the event C.W.B. selling trade in grain. MBN MORTON SOSLAND, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Milling & Baking News - October 18, 2011

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