Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz’s planned meeting tomorrow on the future of the Prairie barley industry is rather too exclusive from where some farm groups sit.
Ritz on Jan. 17 called a Jan. 29 meeting in Ottawa with officials from the Canadian Wheat Board and representatives from “industry groups, producers, grain handlers and malting companies.”
Alberta and Saskatchewan’s agriculture ministers, George Groeneveld and Bob Bjornerud, said Monday they will also attend the meeting, in a joint statement from them and British Columbia’s ag minister Pat Bell.
In a statement Monday Ritz said the meeting will “focus on finding ways to achieve marketing freedom for barley growers” and for farmers and industry to “discuss the problems they see with the CashPlus program.”
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CashPlus is the CWB’s proposed cash-price option for Prairie malting barley, which has come under weeks of criticism by groups representing maltsters, grain handlers and farmers opposed to the CWB’s single marketing desks for Prairie wheat and barley.
Conspicuous by their absence from the guest list are the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, the National Farmers Union (NFU) and the CFA’s provincial affiliate groups — “the farm groups that represent the majority of Canadian farmers,” the NFU said in a release Monday.
Ritz, the NFU said, is holding his meeting “at an undisclosed location” in Ottawa and has convened it “in order to pressure the CWB to transfer barley marketing authority from itself and farmers to grain and malt companies.”
The western ag ministers — absent Manitoba’s Rosann Wowchuk, whose government supports the CWB’s single desk — noted in their release that 62 per cent of barley producers voted in a March 2007 plebiscite to remove the CWB’s single desk for Prairie barley sales.
They added that other groups attending the meeting will include the Western Grain Elevator Association, the Western Barley Growers Association and the Alberta Barley Commission, all of which back the federal government in supporting what it calls “marketing choice.”
