e-brief A Bushel Half Full: Reforming the Canadian Wheat Board
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) is, by law, the sole buyer of Western Canadian wheat and barley that is destined for human consumption or export markets. With a total of 21 million tonnes of grain marketed from August 2006 to July 2007 (Canadian Wheat Board 2007a), it ranks as the largest wheat and barley marketer in the world. 1 Since 1935, the CWB has been collecting and pooling grains from farmers in the Prairies – a practice made compulsory in 1943 – and disseminating market data. A central mandate of the CWB is to improve the financial returns to producers by leveraging the power of marketing through a “single desk.” 2 But does it? In this e-brief we examine available evidence on whether the CWB’s programs and management practices deliver farmers the best possible return in the international grain market. We benchmark the performance of one specific program, the Daily Price Contract (DPC) program, which serves as a window on the CWB’s overall performance, and conclude that it does not deliver on its mandate. Benchmarking, however imperfect, could be a useful exercise for the CWB. In this study, for example, we use the US market as the main point of comparison, because we believe that comparing DPC prices against US prices is an appropriate way to benchmark CWB performance, given that the explicit goal of the DPC was to give Canadian farmers a price based on US markets (Canadian Wheat Board 2006). We find that the CWB's performance in delivering good prices for farmers is not strong, and recommend that the CWB enact reforms to provide: (i) greater transparency for farmers on its performance; and (ii) greater accountability on the part of CWB management to the farmer-elected board of directors. Background: What the Canadian Wheat Board Does Western grain farmers sell their grain to the CWB, which sells the wheat on international markets on their behalf. Farmers are first given a pre-determined initial payment per tonne on delivery, then a final payment after the CWB sells all their pooled wheat. This is known as price pooling. I N
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.124 | 0.021 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".