Canada’s canola farmers fear Huawei dispute could devastate rural communities reliant on China exports
- China blocked imports from the country’s biggest exporter of canola, Richardson International, in what is believed to be retaliation for arrest of Huawei’s CFO
- Comparisons with China’s imposition of import controls on Norwegian salmon in retribution for Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize awarded in Oslo in 2010
It is 5pm on Thursday evening in Killarney, a rural community in Canada’s Manitoba province, and Scott Kroeker is about to call it a day.
“It is warming up here, we’re at a balmy -12 degrees [Celsius; 10 Fahrenheit], it’s getting better – It’s been -25 [-13 Fahrenheit] all week,” he said, explaining that the blankets of snow that cover his 4,500 acres of farmland will soon begin to thaw, after which he had planned to plant the canola seeds for the year ahead.
The Kroeker family farm has been growing canola since the mid-1970s and has kept busy through the winter, using heaters to keep the engines of their grain trucks warm as they hauled harvested grain into the vehicles.
The canola is then driven to huge concrete grain elevators – massive storage – where it sits before its transfer to railway wagons, which take it to the Port of Vancouver. It is then a six day journey to Shanghai, where much of the crop now ends up, helping meet China’s growing demand for canola oil, used predominantly for cooking.
The company had its canola exporting permit revoked on Tuesday on the grounds that some Canadian imports were contaminated with pests or bacteria