Canada: Canadian Chamber of Commerce reiterates support for voluntary CWB and no-cost licences for export

The Canadian Chamber of Commerce has reiterated its support for a voluntary Canadian Wheat Board and now also urges no-cost licenses for shipping wheat and barley products out of province or for export, Grainews communicated on September, 30.

The chamber's membership approved a resolution to that effect during its four-day annual general meeting, which ended on September, 28 in Gatineau, Quebec.

Its resolution, introduced by the Red Deer, Alta. Chamber of Commerce and brought forward to the national body through its international affairs committee, is an update of the national group's position from 2007, which expires this year.

The CWB's current mandatory single-desk model for Prairie wheat and barley exports "restricts (value-added) investment in wheat and barley, significantly diminishing the ability of farmers and industry to respond to market demands and earn a premium return in recognition of the innovation provided, including innovation in value-added processing," the resolution said.

Removal of the single desk in other countries, the national chamber said, "has led to new investment and growth in value-added activities, benefiting all members of wheat and barley value chains from consumers to processors to farmers."

As examples, it cited Argentina, Australia, Ukraine and Russia.

As in 2007, the chamber's new resolution calls for an amendment to the CWB Act to provide Prairie farmers and value-added processors with "the voluntary option to participate" in the CWB pooling system and give all farmers "the right to market their own production of wheat and barley to any buyer they choose."

New for 2010, however, the chamber's resolution also calls for Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz, "as a first step," to immediately "instruct the CWB to issue no-cost licenses for all interprovincial and export shipments of value-added products of wheat and barley."

Such a move, the chamber said, would "allow present and new processors to work directly with growers and thereby encourage an expansion of value-added processing of wheat and barley in the Prairie provinces."

One pro-deregulation farmers' group, the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association, hailed the chamber's resolution in a release on September, 29.

"The chamber recognizes that greater prosperity will come about in an open and competitive market," Kevin Bender, the farm group's president and a farmer at Bentley, Alta., said in the release.

"One only has to look at the tremendous investment in (Canada's) canola, pulse and oat industries to see the prosperity that can occur when farmers and processors are free to do business with one another."

The Ottawa-based Canadian Chamber of Commerce, whose membership includes over 300 Canadian chambers of commerce and boards of trade, bills itself as "the primary and vital connection between business and the federal government."

01 October, 2010