The CEO of Australia’s Queensland Sugar is expected to be named soon as the new CEO of the Canadian Wheat Board, the Manitoba Co-operator reports in its latest issue.
The farm newspaper’s Jan. 24 issue quotes unnamed sources identifying Ian White, the Brisbane-based sugar firm’s managing director and CEO, as the federal government’s chosen appointee.
Reporter Allan Dawson wrote that the government could announce White’s appointment as early as this week.
The federal government — which remains at loggerheads with the majority of the CWB board of directors over the government’s plans to end the CWB’s single marketing desk for Prairie barley — is in charge of hiring and firing the board’s CEO. In late 2006 it fired CWB CEO Adrian Measner and replaced him on an interim basis with the board’s former CEO, Greg Arason.
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A subcommittee of the CWB’s board of directors launched a search last August for a new CEO. The board must accept Ottawa’s choice but retains control over the size of his or her paycheque.
Queensland Sugar markets sugar with a statutory “single desk,” the Co-operator reported, but Australian legislation passed in 2004 exempts raw sugar from that single desk if it’s to be sold in bags for export or to be processed into products such as ethanol or bioplastics.
Queensland, on its web site, cites White’s experience in senior management in the ag commodity business in both Australia and North America, with companies including Queensland Cotton, Defiance Mills and Grainco, the Co-operator noted.
