THE Grain Growers Association (GGA) wants to expand its WA membership base and play a leading role in the provision of industry good services, for the deregulated Australian wheat export market.
GGA CEO Peter Flottmann was in Perth last week and spoke to Farm Weekly about the motives behind his company’s expansion plans.
Mr Flottmann said the GGA was known in WA as an eastern states organisation born out of Grain Corp.
However, he said that perception was out of touch with the new direction that the not-for-profit organisation was now heading in.
“The perception in WA is that we are still joined at the hip with GrainCorp but we are not,” he said.
“We still have equity in the company but we are absolutely independent.
“Our membership grew on GrainCorp’s expansion out of NSW and into Victoria and QLD, but we have a membership model that is challenging us at the moment.
“We are trying to build a membership base on the provision of services to our members; not just growers but also others in the supply chain.
“What’s confusing things a little bit is the business model we are growing out of, into the one we want to be.
“Membership in our current structure is important to us, but only if it leads to members utilising the services that our underlying companies provide, otherwise it doesn’t deliver any value for us.”
Financially the GGA is in a strong position with 17,000 members, all grain growers.
However, it only has about 50 members in WA.
Mr Flottmann said the grains industry was passing through a critical settling in period post-deregulation that presented opportunities for the GGA.
He said during that transition, the industry needed to work out what it wanted, how it would operate and what functions it was going to perform.
“It’s fair to say there’s no silver bullet to any of that,” he said.
“There have been calls for a new entity to provide what we call industry soft services and the US Wheat Associates (USW) model is one model that has been put forward to adopt,.
“These are services that most parts of the industry acknowledge are important but no one wants to pay for them.
“It’s difficult for the industry to make that transition because historically those functions were performed under the monopoly regime.
“It was easier for AWB to amities those costs across a national pooling arrangement, whereas now those costs are a lot more transparent and the exporters are trying to make and create competitive points of difference in their own right.
“While there’s a lack of agreement on which services should be pre-competitive, the transition to providing broader industry support functions is always going to be a bit difficult.
“The question is being raised as to who is doing these services in the industry and some are already being done.
“The GGA is one company in that space and we are doing these things already in many respects, but perhaps that’s not recognised at a public level.”
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