Barley market not tied to single-desk fight: Ritter

Prices for Prairie barley have little to do with the prospects of an open market and have climbed, not fallen, said Canadian Wheat Board chairman Ken Ritter Thursday, rebutting claims Wednesday by Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Ritter said Harper’s comments in the House of Commons, which were part of his response to Tuesday night’s throne speech, create the “mistaken impression” that prices move up and down only in response to the likelihood of an open market.

Specifically, Harper said that “this spring when it looked like there would be marketing choice for western barley farmers, prices went up. When marketing choice was swept off the table, prices went down.”

Ritter, who farms at Kindersley, Sask., retorted in a CWB release Thursday that grain companies had offered farmers contracts of up to $4.75 per bushel for malting barley between June 11 and July 31, before the court ruling that shot down the government’s plans for “marketing choice” — that is, to end the CWB’s single desk for marketing Prairie barley.

Following the Federal Court ruling July 31, Ritter said, markets climbed “steadily” to the point where the board projects returns for farmers of up to $5.06 per bushel at an Alberta farmgate, and that returns may rise further as the CWB continues to make sales.

Markets, he said, are governed by many factors including supply and demand, competition, quality and customer preference.

Prairie farmers can expect “significantly higher” returns this year than U.S. grain growers, many of whom sold wheat and durum at far lower prices before the recent price surge, because they believed the market had peaked, Ritter added.

National Farmers Union president Stewart Wells of Swift Current, Sask., went further, saying No. 1 CW feed barley prices began to drop, if for any reason, within hours of the Harper government’s June announcement that it would scrap the single desk via a Cabinet order-in-council.

“Not only does Prime Minister Harper not grow or sell any grain, apparently he doesn’t read the commodity charts either,” Wells said in a release.

But the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association, which supports the government’s bid to end the single barley desk, disputed Ritter’s claim Friday by charting the difference in feed barley prices in the cash market between Alberta and Montana.

Leading up to the July 31 court ruling, Alberta feed barley cash prices were trading as much as $35 per tonne above those in Montana, the group said Friday, but as of Oct. 12, Alberta cash feed barley prices were $73 per tonne below Montana values.

In recent years, the group said, over 70 per cent of Prairie barley has been sold into the off-board feed market. “It doesn’t matter whether you look at spot prices or average prices, the returns the CWB is providing western farmers are far below the market returns that are being received by U.S. farmers, for either feed or malt barley,” said Wheat Growers vice-president Stephen Vandervalk in a release, noting that world barley prices have strengthened “considerably” in recent months.

The government, in Tuesday’s throne speech, specifically reaffirmed its previous pledge to enact “marketing choice” for Prairie barley growers.

Following his statement Wednesday on barley prices, Harper was quoted in Hansard as saying in the Commons that the CWB is “supposed to be getting the best prices for farmers. That is what marketing choice will deliver and we will not rest until we deliver the choice that western farmers voted for.

“Just as we will not stop defending producers in supply-managed industries,” he added, in French.