© AgMedia Inc.
by SUSAN MANN
Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz isn’t mincing any words on a National Farmers Union request to ban packers from using buying arrangements that can lower cattle prices industry-wide.
“Whether they’re shilling for prison farms or off on another anti-business rant, the NFU never misses an opportunity to prove they’re completely out of touch with producers on the ground,” Ritz wrote Friday in an email to Better Farming.
He urges the farm organization to “stop wasting time with this kind of proposal” and start representing real farmers.
“The nature of his quote, I guess, speaks for himself," said Grant Robertson, the Union’s Ontario coordinator and a beef farmer in a telephone interview the same day.
In an email later that evening, Robertson said he’s disturbed that Ritz would not consider those who are concerned about captive supply practices as real farmers. “It suggests he is getting advice from people who do not represent most family farmers in this country,” he writes, calling Ritz “over the top (in the) way he attacks others.”
The Union requested a law to ban captive supply practices in a letter May 27 to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the three federal party leaders. The Union says beef packers use the practices, which include forward contracting without fixed prices, packer feeding, and exclusive marketing/purchasing agreements, to suppress prices to independent sellers.
Harper hasn’t yet responded.
The practices “allow large buyers to stop bidding in cash markets whenever prices rise above levels they wish to pay,” the Union says in its letter, which claims “nearly every study on the issue has concluded that captive supply leads to lower prices for ranchers and farmers.”
Robertson says Ritz is out of step with many politicians in Ottawa, including ones in his own Conservative party who have said that captive supply is an issue.
“We still feel pretty confident that there’s a lot of support for dealing with this issue,” he says.
Lianne Appleby, Ontario Cattlemen’s Association spokesperson, says captive supply is more of a problem in the West than in Ontario.
She notes that the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association has criticized a 2008 NFU study on low prices in the beef industry for not addressing the impact of changing consumer demand on both domestic and North American beef prices. “Banning captive supply would not address this issue,” she says.
A bill introduced in the United States last month would end certain anti-competitive forward marketing contracts and ensure ranchers there have full access to the marketplace.
Robertson says if the United States passes a law banning captive supply and Canada doesn’t “we’re going to leave (Canadian) family farmers, particularly independent feeders and cow-calf operators, in a very vulnerable position.” BF
Comments
I need to know more about captive supply and so does the minister
I relief milked cows once for an nfu "leader". Her husband was taking their daughter to a hospital in another province for cancer treatments. She was to "busy" with nfu business to go. She never seemed to come out of the house before 10 am. I have always had a poor opinion of unions. This just confirmed my own beliefs.
I am not an NFU member or supporter but the one that is out of touch with the small farmer on most comodeties is our glorious Ag minister Ritz. The NFU is right on this one
K.C.
I can't think of any more apt use of the phrase - "the pot calling the kettle black" than Gerry Ritz taking issue with the NFU.
As far as I'm concerned, they're both completely out of touch with everything.
On issue after issue it has been the NFU that has been shown to be right. The only farm organization that warned against CAIS - the NFU. The only farm organization that has suggested more debt is not the answer to declining farm income - the NFU. The only farm organization willing to demonstrate the profiteering of fertilizer companies - the NFU. The only farm organization questioning the real costs to farmers of ethanol - the NFU.
I could go on given the record of being on the side of family farmers the NFU has. If the NFU wasn't around farmers would be much worse off - as hard as that might be to imagine. Farmers owe the NFU and people like Robertson a big thank you for the personal time they take away from their farms and family to do this work. I know they sure don't do it for the pay in the NFU.
If Ritz needs a reality check, the NFU needs one too - a number of people, and organizations with the qualifications to do so (including the Canadian Cattlemens Association) have pointed out basic, and fatal, flaws in the so-called "research" the NFU has assembled in order to make the type of claims Ritz has so-strongly criticized.
When, for example, it comes to claims of "profiteering", the NFU seems to always ignore the basic business reality that farm suppliers will almost always "hold-the-line" when it comes to increasing prices for existing inventory during times of increasing prices. In addition, the NFU seems to always particularly ignore the fact that when suppliers are "caught" with high-price inventory when prices are declining, they have to absorb the loss, or lose market share to competitors who didn't have higher-priced inventory in stock.
If Ritz appears exasperated, it's because of the NFU's overly-sanctimonious attempts to always have things both ways. But the irony is that being sanctimonious, and trying to have things both ways, is little different from the politics Ritz plays himself.
Have you bothered to read both reports. The CCA report is to laugh. It is contradictory, based on poor logic and agrues both sides of the issue without actually ever addressing anything.
Given your own poor track record of getting it right, you might want to step back from your constant attacks on everything the NFU does.
The NFU accuses Ritz of "attack" methodology - yet, the above posting simply proves that when it comes to "attack", NFU supporters really do have a double-standard
Perhaps when the NFU actually does something right, people including the Minister of Agriculture, might not heap such abuse on the NFU - until then, the abuse is well-deserved, but Ritz is hardly the poster-boy who should be delivering the message.
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