ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the recent dismantling of the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) in the context of three decades of neoliberal restructuring in the Western Canadian grains sector. The prairie region of Western Canada has been a grain exporting “bread basket” since the 1870s. Over this long history, relations of conflict and cooperation among farmers, the state, and agribusiness have given rise to different institutional configurations for regulating the sector and integrating it into world markets. In the postwar period, the CWB became the linchpin for regulating relations among state, market, and society in the grains sector. Since the 1980s, Canadian governments, agribusiness, and some farm groups have pursued a neoliberalizing agenda that has substantially restructured the sector. These actors translated the neoliberal impulse for “liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills” (Harvey, 2005, p. 2) into a program for scaling back state support for agriculture, deepening the sector’s export orientation and pursuing free trade. Yet, restructuring of the prairie grain sector has unfolded unevenly in a process shaped by political contestation and institutional contexts.
