On Saturday, January 21, the giant grain and financial company, Cargill, is going to be the recipient of a Global Citizens' arrest for, as the organizers say, “profiteering off people and the planet.” It would take too long to list the indictment of Cargill’s many crimes, but one of its latest is a campaign to destroy the Canadian Wheat Board in partnership with a gang of powerful agribusiness corporations, called Grain Visions. Its members include, in addition to Cargill, Louis Dreyfus Canada Limited, Rahr Malting Canada Limited, Agricore United (a company whose largest single shareholder is ADM), Saskatchewan Wheat Pool (no longer a farmer cooperative) and James Richardson International Limited.
The Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) has been a thorn in the side of the big grain companies since 1935. The CWB came from a long line of Canadian wheat marketing boards, coops and grain pools led by western farmers who used their collective marketing power to force the Cargills of the world to pay a fair price.
CWB operates under the authority of parliament, but the majority of its board members are farmer-elected. Over the years the CWB has been weakened by the steady assaults of agribusiness, NAFTA provisions and WTO rulings that if implemented would put the Wheat Board out of business permanently.
The conservative Canadian administration of Stephen Harper declared all-out war on the CWB, driving out pro-wheat board provincial appointees and attempting to enforce the Marketing Freedom for Grain Farmers Act without holding a legally required farmer’s plebiscite. This latest attack on the CWB was challenged in federal court in December of 2011 and found to be “an affront to the rule of law.”
When three companies—Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Cargill—control an estimated 90 percent of the world's grain trade, making billions in profits while the world faces the prospect of devastating food crises, it isn’t surprising that citizens are calling for their arrest.
