The Canadian Wheat Board will still offer forward sales contracts from its malting barley pool to maltsters and other customers, along with its new CashPlus cash price option for farmers, the grain marketing agency said Thursday.
“We continue to encourage the industry to offer contracts to barley farmers under CashPlus,” said CWB CEO Greg Arason in a news release. The recently announced CashPlus program continues to face opposition from Canada’s four biggest maltsters, its larger grain companies and some farmer groups opposed to the CWB’s single marketing desk for Prairie barley.
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Arason previously said he will attend a meeting with federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz in Ottawa on Tuesday to defend CashPlus, a program Ritz has also publicly opposed. Representatives from maltsters, grain handlers and farm groups are also expected to attend the Jan. 29 meeting.
Ritz, in a Jan. 17 release, said the meeting will “focus on finding ways to move toward marketing choice for barley growers.”
“Cash-buying discussions will continue because we believe many farmers would prefer the upfront certainty of a cash-pricing option,” Arason said in the CWB’s release Thursday. “We will also facilitate sales to those maltsters that decide to accept deliveries from farmers who choose pooling.”
In 2008-09, the CWB said, it will sell under normal contract conditions for shipment prior to Dec. 31, 2008. Prices for pre-harvest sales with shipment periods past Jan. 1, 2009 will include a risk premium, the board wrote, ” to ensure the pool attracts deliveries from farmers and that pool participants are not disadvantaged.”
Discussions with the industry over the past few months centred on the ability of the CashPlus program to deal with upheaval and uncertainty for farmers and the industry, such as what occurred last year after the federal government announced its intention to create an open barley market, Arason said in the release.
“This regulatory and legislative uncertainty continues this year, which makes forward pool sales risky, pool return outlook (PRO) forecasting more difficult and adds risk to producer payment options,” he said.
