The Alberta farmer who became the Canadian Wheat Board’s first elected pro-deregulation director has joined the council overseeing supply management of Canadian eggs and poultry.
Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz on Friday appointed Jim Chatenay of Red Deer to a 28-month term on the Farm Products Council of Canada.
“With his substantial agricultural background, including his decade-long experience as a Canadian Wheat Board director, Mr. Chatenay will be a great addition to the council,” Ritz said in a release.
The council supervises the operations of the four national marketing agencies that manage the supply of Canadian chicken, turkey, eggs and broiler hatching eggs. The agencies establish and allocate production quota, promote products, raise funds through levies and license marketers.
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The council also supervises the operation of the Canadian Beef Cattle Research, Market Development and Promotion Agency.
Chatenay’s term as a council member will run from Aug. 24 this year to Dec. 18, 2012.
Now retired, Chatenay had grown grain and raised cattle on the family farm at Penhold, near Red Deer, since 1964 and earned a reputation as a “pioneer” in Canada’s purebred Charolais industry, the government noted.
He also served as a board member with the Alberta Charolais Association for six years and as a member of the barley advisory committee of the Western Grains Research Foundation.
In 1998, Chatenay, a staunch supporter of what the current federal government has dubbed “marketing choice” for Prairie wheat and barley growers, became one of the CWB’s first 10 farmer-elected directors. He was re-elected twice to represent the board’s District 2 before stepping down in 2008 due to term limits.
His service on the board was briefly interrupted by a few weeks’ jail time in 2002, relating to an earlier protest spearheaded by a pro-deregulation group, Farmers for Justice, against the CWB’s single marketing desk for wheat and barley. The 1998 protest had involved farmers driving token amounts of board grains into the U.S.
As a CWB board member, the government noted, Chatenay served on several director committees including audit, finance and risk; governance and management resources; strategic issues; benchmarking; and trade and transportation.
Ritz on Friday also reappointed another Farm Products Council member, broiler breeder and dairyman Ed De Jong of Abbotsford, B.C., to another three-year term effective “immediately.”
De Jong’s resume in supply-managed sectors has included stints as a director with the British Columbia Broiler Hatching Egg Producers’ Association and the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, and as a chairman of the B.C. Broiler Hatching Egg Commission and chairman of the Canadian Hatching Egg Producers.
