By Thomas Miller
In collaboration with the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture, the Government of Alberta put on an information session at the Wildrose Pavilion at the Exhibition Grounds on Tuesday in regards to changes to the barley and wheat marketing system.
With speakers from the Canadian Wheat Board, the Canadian Grain Commission, Quorum and elsewhere, locals in the agriculture field were able to continue learning about the changes that will go in effect this August.
Rod Carlyon, branch head of livestock business development for Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development, said they still don’t have all the answers yet, but they want to make sure farmers have all the same information they do.
“We’re very early on,” said Carlyon.
“This is only January and we’re a month after the legislative change so what we’ve seen is people are coming, they’re looking for some information and we give them what we know and we tell them what we don’t know. We get 90 per cent of everything answered in these presentations, 10 per cent more questions, some we know, some we have no clue on yet.”
One question Carlyon said they don’t have an answer to yet is what contracts with the Canadian Wheat Board will look like.
One unique aspect of this particular session was the perspective of Geoff Honey, CEO of Grain Trade Australia.
The first harvest under a deregulated environment in Australia was 2008-09, so Honey was brought in to give farmers an idea of what might happen.
However, he said there are far more differences than similarities between the two situations and Canadians need to recognize that the Australian Wheat Board was a far different structure than the CWB.
“It’s really important to recognize that the Australian Wheat Board started a program back in the mid ’90s to put the AWB into a publicly listed company and taking it out of the control of government,” he said after his presentation. “So that organization had export wheat arrangements in place but it was also doing domestic trading as well. In that respect it was a very mature organization. It wasn’t just doing export wheat and in the end it wasn’t doing it under a statutory environment.
“The Australian Wheat Board was privatized in 2001 and the shares were trading on the Australian Stock Exchange in 2001 so it was a publicly listed company. That’s one difference straight away.
“AWB Limited had a balance sheet with $600 million in it. Whereas the Canadian Wheat Board doesn’t have that provision, it’s got contingency funds, I don’t know if those will be used for trading purposes so that’s another difference, the Canadian Wheat Board has government guarantees in place for loans, the AWB didn’t have any government guarantees in place for any loans that they took out.”
That said, he did talk about some unexpected outcomes in Australia and one that’s particularly possible for Canada – shipping grain in containers.
He said from what was a very small proportion of Australia’s wheat crop, 10 per cent is now being moved in containers.
Another outcome for Australia was a shift in market focus.
They now ship 70 per cent of their wheat into Asian markets, whereas previously they had focused on the Middle East, but that had more to do with geography than anything else.
The information session in Lloydminster was the third of nine for Alberta and the first of seven for Saskatchewan. The only remaining session in this region is in Vegreville on Feb. 6.