Myth of a dual-market finally put to rest.

[Fransisco]

Your right Air Canada did go bankrupt at one point, restructured and now successfully 'competes'. It is the largest Canadian airline with an annual revenue of just under $10 billion.

Oh yeah, its a real disaster! LOL!

[Fransisco]

Face the facts cchurch your argument holds about as much water as a hula hoop.

[cityguy]

Is Ontario considered a dual market? OWPMB which is now part of GFO handles (according to the annual report) about 175,000 tonnes of wheat in '08 and '09, both less than 10% of the crop.

At the end of the day, dual or not, it's just a question of whether or not a CWB will succeed in an open market environment. Maybe it will quite well thank you very much, maybe it won't do that well like the OWB, or maybe it will just fade away like the AWB. Does it really matter? If it succeeds - good for them. If not, nice knowing ya.

[Fransisco]

What gets me about this argument is that I thought it was supposed to be about whats best for farmers. Which is in no way, shape or form the same thing as whats best for the CWB.

[agriman]

The way the Wheat Board is going they could not
sell condoms in a *****house.

[bucket]

cchurch

SO, you openly support corrupt grain marketing agencies?

The awb is out of business because of its corrupt dealings with Iraq.

Maybe you would like to be in that company.

On second thought maybe the cwb ought to try what the awb did. Then they would be out of business as well.

Haven't heard to many aussies complaining, have you?

[bucket]

Godd analogy agriman.

But,don't they give condoms away at *****houses as well?

[JohnGalt]

But the CWB would market the free condoms to the Japanese for a premium.

[TOM4CWB]

Cityguy,

"Is Ontario considered a dual market? OWPMB which is now part of GFO handles (according to the annual report) about 175,000 tonnes of wheat in '08 and '09, both less than 10% of the crop."

All that is needed... is a transparent 'arbitrage' opportunity... the right for Ontario wheat producers to market their own wheat...

IF

the wheat buyers decide to take advantage of wheat growers.

It does not take 600 people and $100 million to make a transparent market.

All it takes is a free export license form... filled out/reported to Customs Canada on the way out of the country... just like Ontario does!!!

Even Ontario and Quebec growers could figure that out!!!

The rest of the world... is a dual market... cause the CWB is still here!!! We still have a 'dual' market... outside the CWB 'designated area'... and the CWB has NO 'single desk' to supply wheat!!!

Your myth is busted cchurch!!!

[cityguy]

The question is whether or not the CWB could exist in an open market. The OWB exists and handles less than 10% of Ontario wheat. AWB sort of exists but was bought by a fertilizer company for it's retail fertilize distribution network. It will be interesting to see if Agrium gets into the grain side of the business down there. And as for the old AWB being corrupt, no doubt that's what put them out of business as there was a very public backlash that put them out of business. If the CWB had done the kickback deal they'd probably be out of business as well. It can and has been argued by many farmer in Australia that if there hadn't have been the kickback scandal the AWB single desk may still be in business.

[TOM4CWB]

Cityguy,

"The question is whether or not the CWB could exist in an open market."

That is not up for debate. The CWB is just like the CGC... it has a legislated mandate (it is an Act of the Parliament of Canada)... the ability to charge back an operating fee; (like OWPMB did)...

The CWB could become a simple 'honest broker' if it wanted... to simply and transparently monitor the prices and arbitrage savings IF grain co's ripped off wheat growers.

For some strange reason... this would seem to violate the grain industry right to extract huge profits from wheat growers in the CWB'designated area'...

So

We instead have a pool based system with no choice... bottom priced... secret system that obviously rips off growers AT LEAST $1/bu at almost any time an inspection is done.

In about 2003 CWB could compete with US marketers any time any place.

Today the CWB has found out... they can not extract the same premiums US growers retain from their marketing system. We have 'higher quality' grades... and get less returns for higher quality.

[TOM4CWB]

Cityguy,

If you were allowed to see what happened in the Iraq 'Food for Oil' and AWB/CWB dealings... you would do some serious head scratching... JUST LIKE MP DAVID ANDERSON did.

In Canada...We believe in not digging up graves of past CDN Gov. CWB Ministers and what exactly they did/knew... so future governance lattitude is not obstructed.

[TOM4CWB]

Cityguy,

I asked CWB Chairman Ritter about this... and he said it was up to their Agents to look after themselves.

'Thursday, May 12, 2005
Did Sask Wheat Pool Sell Oil for Food Wheat Through a Middleman?
and if so, who?
CBC Manitoba:
WINNIPEG – The Canadian Wheat Board is demanding a retraction from Saskatchewan MP David Anderson for comments he made in the House of Commons.

Last Friday, Conservative MP David Anderson stood in the House of Commons and accused the Wheat Board of illegal and corrupt practices in respect to a sale by the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool into Iraq's oil-for-food program.

"This directly affects Canadians because 30 per cent of the value of the contract disappeared through shipping delays and what are referred to as transfers to other buyers, whatever they are. That sounds like even more corruption," Anderson said. "How did the Wheat Board and its exporters manage to lose $8 million out of a $23 million illegal deal with Iraq?"
[...]
Wheat Board spokeswoman Louise Waldman says there is no basis to the allegations, which Anderson has declined to repeat outside the House of Commons. By law, MPs cannot be sued for anything they say inside Parliament.

The Wheat Board has asked Anderson to retract the comments. Waldman says as a marketing agency, the board has two things going for it: its product and its reputation.

"We have an extremely high-quality product, and we also have an extremely good reputation," she says. "We're viewed as having a lot of integrity in the international grain business, and our salespeople are extremely well-respected. So we felt that Mr. Anderson's comments threatened or damaged, could have damaged, this reputation."

[TOM4CWB]

Cityguy,

background:

"After Saddam was deposed, coalition forces examined outstanding oil-for-food contracts and asked many vendors to take 10 per cent off their prices.
Mr McBride said Australia had been asked to renegotiate some of its wheat contracts, "but they are commercial in confidence, so we don't discuss (what happened to the) price".
Congressman Chris Shays, who is leading a US House of Representatives investigation into the oil-for-food program, told reporters on his return from Iraq this week that Saddam skimmed $US10 billion from the program. Mr Shays said he had evidence that "everyone who participated in this program benefited. You were not a player unless you were giving something to Saddam."
A member of the Egyptian Parliament, Emad Geldah, also said businesses had "no choice" but to follow Iraq's instructions. "If you wanted to do business with Iraq, these were the conditions you had to abide by," he said.
In September 2002, the Coalition for International Justice in Washington named the Australian Wheat Board as "the main exporter to Iraq, with contracts worth more than twice those obtained by any other single company". The second largest supplier was the Vietnam Northern Food Corporation, which supplied rice to Iraq.
At least three other bodies are investigating alleged corruption and fraud in the oil-for-food program, including the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the House of Representatives Committee on International Relations and the Iraqi Governing Council in Baghdad.'


As a matter of record:

"Oil-For-Food Reaches Saskatchewan Wheat Pool
Uh oh.....
The Saskatchewan Wheat Pool has emerged as one of the companies involved in Iraq oil- for-food deals now under investigation by a U.S. congressional committee probing the United Nations aid program, which Saddam Hussein manipulated to skim off billions of dollars for himself.
The focus on the company comes as the UN announced Friday it had discovered a staff-rule violation by Canadian businessperson and international diplomat Maurice Strong, whose long record at the world body is being reviewed after he, too, was recently swept up in the swirl of oil-for-food allegations and inquiries.
Six U.S. congressional committees and the UN itself are investigating the $50.92-billion program following allegations of mismanagement and corruption that helped Saddam siphon off funds through kickbacks and other forms of manipulation. A U.S. federal investigation is also underway in New York, and has already issued several indictments.
[...]
The congressional hearing in which the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool was mentioned Thursday saw BNP Paribas, the bank the UN used to broker deals in the oil-for-food program, acknowledge it improperly made 403 payments to third parties or their banks rather than to companies approved by the UN to deliver goods for Iraq.
Four of those payments are listed as going to the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool from 1999- 2000, total value $23.15 million, and another two went to a Canadian-registered company called Limpex Trading in 2001, total value $124.1 million."

[TOM4CWB]

Cityguy,

After reading this...

What do you think Chairman Ritter, CWB Minister Goodale, And PM Martin actually knew???

"Microscoping Maurice Strong
by Judi McLeod
Saturday, April 23, 2005

Canadian businessman and UN envoy Maurice Strong is one weird dude.

Weird in his sidekicks. Mikhail Gorbachev, for one. The former Soviet leader and the Canuck really believe they can replace the Ten Commandments with their overstated Earth Charter,

Weird in his handpicked protégés. Try Canada’s Prime Minister Paul Martin, the career politician whose one and only trip to the election polls as Canadian PM reduced the powerful Liberal Party to minority status. This, after assuming the mantle left by the departure of Jean Chrétien in pomp and splendour Indian smudging ceremonies, addressed by Irish rock star, Bono. Martin’s surrealistic ascension to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) had such an emotional impact on Strong that he wept.

Strong actually teared up at the mention of Martin in the PMO on Canada’s state-controlled television network, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), which ran a special, called the Life and Times of Maurice Strong just three months after Martin’s December 12, 2003 swearing-in ceremony. In the special, CBC reporter Ann-Marie McDonald gushed about how Strong was a special guest in the still Gorbachev controlled Kremlin and how he came away with a saber-shaped bottle of brandy from Joseph Stalin’s special stock.

McDonald went on to describe Strong as "a cross between Rasputin and Machiavelli", "the Michelangelo of networking" and an "international traveling salesman with buts of paper in his pocket".

In spite of all of these monikers, Strong, McDonald said, "refuses to be pigeon holed".

You can call it weird from whence Strong came in the world of business. He was spawned by the Montreal-based Power Corporation, whose CEO Paul Desmarais is a key figure in BNP Paribas, Saddam Hussein’s favourite bank and part of the oil-for-food investigation.

Martin, who was hired by Strong, got his start in business from the same source, and because of it ended up as the owner of Canada Steamship Lines. While Strong, now Martin’s senior advisor in the House of Commons is Martin’s long time mentor, the duo is so close that the men are, in some speculative quarters, alleged but unproven half brothers.

Strong is weird in the kind of advisors from whom he says he takes his counsel. For example, "Koreagate Man" Tongsun Park, with whom he admits he has continued to maintain a relationship, and who Strong said in a written statement, advised him on "North Korean issues in my role as a U.N. envoy." In other words, Strong was taking advice from a man the U.S. Attorney’s Office is looking to arrest for allegedly accepting millions of dollars from the Iraqi government while operating in the U.S. as an unregistered agent for Baghdad.

You’d think "the Michelangelo of networking" could do better for himself than that.

Strong is weird in the kind of international assignments he lands. What really qualifies him to conduct UN reform? Precisely what credentials does Strong really have to be dispatched by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to global hot spots like North Korea, and what is he doing when he’s in China?

It is weird that Strong advocates for world depopulation schemes; tells the unwashed masses that both refrigeration and air conditioning are going to wipe out Mother Earth. It’s weird that as a practicing New Ager, Strong dabbles in the occult. Weird is that he didn’t know one of the largest American aquifers was sitting right under the 100,000-acre Baca Ranch in Colorado, he ran as a New Age Mecca with his wife Hanne, and that he came to acquire the property through Saudi arms dealer Adnan Koshoggi.

Weirdest of all is the spin that comes with the Maurice Strong package. The kind of spin about Strong that comes from Nicholas Sonntag, a Canadian who heads up the Beijing office of CH2M Hill, one of the world’s leading environment companies. Sonntag has said of Strong’s business in China: "They (China) are taking a big risk. They’re determined to be the economic engine of the world. This is why Maurice is here--to help them think things through."

Why would an entire country rely on one man to "help them think things through"?

It’s a kind of spin that only the pros at Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor could stop. It shouldn’t matter that Strong is a Canadian spinmeister when it was the Rockefeller family that gained him entree to the United Nations.

Now that a link has been proven between Strong and Park, watch for senior UN officials to begin distancing themselves from "the man with the rolodex to die for".

We can only hope that the mainline media does not forget that Kofi and Mo are the Frick and Frack of the fairytale world in Manhattan. Back in 1997, Maurice Strong’s UN offices were within spitting distance, just down the hall from those of Kofi Annan’s.

Even now, spin-doctor Annan is blaming everything but the UN for the oil-for-food scandal. Annan was only yesterday holding up the "He’s Innocent!" placard, and complimenting Strong just for cooperating with the independent probe panel investing oil-for-food.

What choice does Strong have but to cooperate with the probe? He may be Envoy God to Annan, but not to serious investigators.

Even in Canada where he’s senior advisor to the prime minister, average Canadians know little about Strong, who is remembered most for trying to use their tax dollars to purchase a Costa Rican rain forest when he was running Ontario Hydro.

Strong is out there alright, but somewhere in all the either and the fog.

In the end it could have been the weirdness of Maurice Strong as described by those media outlets Strong catalogued as believing in black helicopter conspiracies that inadvertently kept him covered in a fog.

It’s time for Maurice Strong to be dragged in out of the fog and examined close up if only to ascertain who and what he really is."