THE CWB AND ORGANIC GRAIN

[TOM4CWB]

CWBRULES,

I think the organic wheat and barley is in direct parallel to Pedigreed Seed if not even less of a concern to the CWB.

Pedigreed seed gets all the export licenses it needs, at 0 cost.

Pedigreed seed when shipped to the US makes 20 to 50 times more high Canadian quality type wheat, to then be sold in direct competition with CWB Canadian Wheat. At least Organic Wheat is just consumed, and doesn't come back the next year at harvest to be competition!

CWB logic is totally out to lunch, but they tell me they are right, and obviously this must mean that I am just a stupid farmer who has never marketed any wheat or barley in my life.

You see, only the CWB markets grain, all of us farmers are just price takers not price makers!

I wonder how many of us would still be farming, if this was actually a fact?

[parsley]

wedino, were you at the Weyburn meting? Can you translate a little more clearly what Ritter mean, if you were there?

Parsley

[wedino]

Parsley, Ken Ridder, at the supper meeting in Weyburn, stated "Regular grain is switched for & sold as organic grain in the USA & thereby competes with grain the CWB is marketing into USA"

This is what he said. I took it to mean that non organic grain was labeled & sold as organic grain.

[Vader]

It has been said that the CWB has discipline in its marketing and that discipline creates premium markets. One such premium market is the United States. The CWB feels that its marketing discipline has created premium prices in the United States and it is unfair for producers to "cherry pick" in the US market those premium prices.

Could anything be more ridiculous than for the CWB to claim that it is responsible for the higher prices that exist in the US.

Once you accept that the CWB is responsible for the premium prices in the US then all other logic flows from this mistaken assumption.

Yes Organic grain commands a premium over conventional grain. If the organic producer goes through the "buy back" then he will still be able to get the premium which organic grain commands over conventional. Through the "buy back" mechanism the CWB will extract the premium which the CWB has "created" over the domestic price.

All this makes perfect sense if you can swallow the "big lie" that the CWB single desk selling discipline "creates" higher prices in our so called "premium" markets. This might be true if the CWB had a selling monopoly and was the only marketer of wheat in world markets. However the truth is that the CWB only has a buying monopoly here in Canada and that does not give the CWB the ability to produce higher world prices. What the CWB buying monopoly does is to force Canadian producers to accept the average selling price for wheat sales into some 70 countries worldwide. The apparent reality of this system is net final payments to producers that appear to be consistently lower than the prices available to our neighbors to the south who do not have a "buying monopoly".

[TOM4CWB]

Vader,

Really all we are saying is that when we market through the CWB we agree that price cutting is our prefered method of selling grain.

How else can I take what the CWB does?

Why should China get wheat cheaper from me than the US or Europe?

China pays up for Canola, and makes domestic users of Canola pay more than they want to!

Why should we be forced to sell through this chaotic CWB system?