Commission decrees bean groups must unite

Saturday, November 24, 2012

by SUSAN MANN

The Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission is going ahead with regulatory changes to form Ontario Bean Growers now that farmers have voted in favour of a proposal to have one bean organization representing the province’s producers.

In a Nov. 22 letter to Grant Jones, chair of the Ontario Bean Producers’ Marketing Board, and Dave Woods, chair of the Ontario Coloured Bean Growers’ Association, commission chair Geri Kamenz says with 1,284 voter packages mailed out the vote garnered a 28 per cent participation rate. Seventy-seven per cent of the participants and who represent 81 per cent of the production voted in favour of the proposal.

Kamenz says the results surpassed their guidelines and “very clearly indicate white and coloured bean growers support the creation of a single marketing board for beans.”

The commission’s thresholds are 66 per cent of participants voting ‘yes’ and of those voting yes representing more than 50 per cent of the production.

The question farmers were asked on the mail-in ballot was: ‘Are you in favour of the creation of a single board under the Farm Products Marketing Act for white pea beans and coloured beans described as Ontario Bean Growers in the enclosed information summary?”

Bernadine Wolfe, general manager of the coloured bean growers association, says they’re aiming to have the new organization in place for the 2013 crop year. For growers, nothing changes immediately.

Wolfe says it isn’t clear what the Ontario bean marketing board’s recent formation of the Ontario White Bean Growers’ Association means for the new organization. On November 21, the marketing board, announced that it had transferred about $1 million — $600,000 in surplus reserve funds and the ownership of its building in London — to a new association. “We take our direction from farm products (the commission) so we are waiting to see what farm products decides on this.”

In his letter to Jones and Woods, commission chair Kamenz notes that the proposal producers voted on didn't include any proposed transfer of Ontario Bean Producers' Marketing Board assets, including marketing board funds, to an outside organization and the commission has never suggested this as a possibility.

Kamenz also says in the letter there are limitations on what a marketing board can do with its assets under the Farm Products Marketing Act. Given the information in the marketing board's Nov. 22 news release, the commission has serious concerns about the nature of these transactions and the marketing board's authority under the farm products marketing act to transfer funds to the Ontario White Bean Growers' Association. The commission needs the immediate cooperation of the marketing board's directors to resolve these concerns, he says.

The Ontario bean producers marketing board wasn’t in favour of proceeding with the vote and pulled out in September but the commission opted to hold the vote anyway. BF