Open letter to Brian Otto, president of Western Barley Growers Association: I dissected the results of the CWB elections and found a very different result and meaning than the outcome your ads proclaim.
Upon looking at who originally voted in the first round and then calculating where they went on the second ballot, it became quite apparent that once the candidate who they knew best fell short, their next choice was flight to the safety of the proclaimed single-desk supporting candidates.
By doing some simple math it became painfully obvious that approx. 80 per cent plus of producers who voted support single-desk selling. That closely mimics the actual outcome of directors elected by the actual voters.
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There’s much talk these days about diversifying Canadian agriculture’s exports away from their reliance on the sector’s two biggest, and currently most unpredictable, customers.
Support your friend first and hope he changes because most do once they learn more about how supply and demand works, but duck to the safety of collective selling when your friend is eliminated.
This is easy to understand when you see the results of FNA adding just one additional seller into the wild oat herbicide complex last spring, reducing the total sales price of wild oat chemicals in Canada by more than $60 million in only 45 days. (That’s enough to buy two lake freighters right there.)
One little crack in the collective selling of the big companies and they ended up with $60 million less dollars. Think about how financially imprudent it would be to add tens of thousands more sellers into the wheat and barley sellers’ market.
The law of supply and demand is like the law of gravity. It works whether you believe in it or not.
Andrew Dennis Brookdale, Man.
Please forward letters to Manitoba Co-operator, 1666 Dublin Ave., Winnipeg, R3H 0H1 or Fax: 204-954-1422 or email: [email protected] (subject: To the editor)
