What was the Canadian Wheat Board? why was it dissolved? and did it benefit or hurt farmers?
In: Economics
The Canadian wheat board was a single desk buyer and seller of Canadian wheat. If you were a wheat farmer, you sold your wheat to the wheat board. If you were looking to buy Canadian wheat, you bought it from the wheat board.
The wheat board was overall a good thing for Canadian wheat farmers, especially smaller farmers as the prices it was able to offer generally beat the free market. It also spent a lot of time overseas growing the Canadian wheat market. Because of it’s size and heft on the global scale the wheat board was able to extract higher prices and fulfil larger contracts than any individual farmer could.
It didn’t benefit all farmers equally though. It was a bigger benefit to smaller family farms and to those farms further from the US border. The bigger wheat farms and those close to major markets tended to be less positive on the wheat board because they had the ability to watch the local market and wait for spikes in spot prices for wheat and cash in. Cattle farmers also hated the wheat board because it kept the prices of cattle feed higher… because they had to complete with all the other global buyers for wheat out of the board.
Of course there was also always the ideological opposition to the wheat board from the usual suspects. Steven Harper eventually just unilaterally killed the board when he couldn’t get farmers to vote against their own interests to get rid of it. It was one more blow to the small family farm. It was also one more step to the capture and monopolization of our agrifood system by big multinational corporations.
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