Smith Says Canada Reneging On Wheat Pact Ag Chairman Says Deputy Minister Broke His Word

Upset about rising Canadian wheat shipments to the United States, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee accused Canada Friday of reneging on voluntary limits.

“It is the first time I can remember when a country represented by the deputy minister outright broke his word and the government’s word,” Rep. Bob Smith, R-Ore., told The Associated Press.

Smith, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, said Canadian Deputy Agriculture Minister Frank Claydon promised him twice this spring that Canada would honor voluntary limits set in 1994 to help protect U.S. wheat farmers.

But U.S. Agriculture Department officials have told Congress that Canadian exports of durum wheat exceeded those levels by more than 21 percent and spring wheat exports by more than 35 percent.

“What in the world is going on?,” said an exasperated Smith. “I can’t believe they are doing this.”

American farmers have long claimed that Canada has been selling wheat in the United States at below cost, an allegation the Canadians deny.

A spokesman for the Canadian Embassy said Claydon would review Smith’s concerns but that the congressman may have misread his earlier conversations with the deputy agriculture minister.

Their previous talks involved “preliminary projections about shipment levels. There was never at any point a suggestion that the Canadian government was committed to a target level,” Canadian Embassy spokesman George Rioux said Friday.

“Our longstanding position on this has been that no export cap would be considered,” he said.

Smith said the excessive shipments couldn’t come at a worse time as Congress considers giving President Clinton expedited authority to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement.

He expressed his concerns in a letter to Claydon in Ottawa. He also told Clinton administration officials he wants to know how they intend to respond.

USDA officials had no response Friday.

Smith acknowledged that the 1994 pact, a memorandum of understanding, imposed only voluntary limits and technically expired on Sept. 12, 1995. But he said the two countries had agreed this spring that Canadian wheat exports would stay broadly within the levels included in that memorandum.