Prairie wheat and barley growers may see substantial upward adjustments next month to their 2010-11 initial payments if a Canadian Wheat Board recommendation gets federal approval.
If approved as submitted, the adjustment payments would boost initials for base grades of wheat, durum, feed barley and malting barley “in the range of $50 to $70 per tonne,” the Winnipeg-based CWB said in an unscheduled bulletin Thursday.
The increase stems from the “significant rise” in grain markets that’s already turned up in the board’s recent pool return outlooks (PROs), the CWB said.
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That said, the board stressed Thursday that the proposed payment amounts are currently “recommendations only and, until officially approved, may be subject to change.”
Also, the CWB’s expected timeframe for such increases, in “mid- to late November,” represents an “estimate only” and can’t be confirmed until federal government approval is received.
The government, as the guarantor of the CWB’s initial payments to farmers, is required by law to approve those payments and any such adjustments.
Government approval, in turn, currently takes analysis from the federal agriculture and finance departments, plus approval from the federal Treasury Board.
The federal government brought forward legislation in May that would yank the requirement for Treasury Board approval. It’s expected that such a move, when or if approved, would speed up the process for CWB initial, interim and final payments by as much as three weeks.
That bill, C-27, passed first reading in May but hasn’t yet gone forward for further debate or discussion.
