Growers, Buyers Working on New Formula to Fund Research

Source from:  Brantford expositor 07/30/2010

The Ontario tobacco board is looking at new ways to fund and conduct research for the crop and its members. Fred Neukamm, chairman of the Ontario Flue-Cured Tobacco Growers' Marketing Board, says a major change in funding arrangements that has supported the Canadian Tobacco Research Foundation is forcing administrators to look at fresh alternatives. For years, fees collected from growers and companies under the former tobacco board's quota system supported the foundation. An amount was agreed to each year at the time of negotiations for that year's crop. The buyers paid 70 per cent of the total and the growers paid 30 per cent through a portion of the annual marketing fee the board changed them. But that arrangement died in the transformation of quota and marketing in 2009 to a new regime and a new board of the same name with licensed growers and buyers, when about 1,200 producers took exit packages in the federal government's $300-million tobacco transition program. In an interview, Neukamm said that under the current arrangements set out by the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission, the board's operations can only be financed through licensing fees, and the rules have no provision for the collection of a marketing fee that could include funding of research. This year, the board worked out an arrangement with buyers under which a majority of them agreed to fund collectively the foundation's operations, but that cannot continue indefinitely, said Neukamm. "It was quite a challenge this year to put a funding formula in place," he said. "When the system was changed we lost the tools to finance the foundation. We've managed to keep the research facility alive for this year but the future is uncertain. It simply is not a sustainable way of doing business." He predicted that a new system of research might lead to the work not being done at a research station but on plot right on the farms of growers. The board also is trying to negotiate funding for research into alternative crops for thousands of acres no longer in tobacco and growers who took the buyout but did not get enough money to make a transition into new pursuits. The board is looking at green energy alternatives, such as growing biomass crops for power generating stations to replace coal. Preliminary research has been conducted for some crops and the early results show promise but a limited ability to move forward, said Neukamm. Enditem