Canadian Railway Strike Could Hurt Country’s Farmers

Canada’s biggest railway is hoping to avoid an engineer strike, which would interrupt a busy period for transporting grain across one of the world’s top exporting countries, and could ring up costs to farmers and grain exporters, USAgNet reports. Negotiators from Canadian National Railway and the union representing 1,700 locomotive engineers met in hopes of averting a strike. The railway has not said what its plans are if the strike proceeds, but a transportation expert said it would certainly interrupt rail service.

“The rail system is like a conveyor belt and it takes some time to start up again after an interruption of service,” said Barry Prentice, director of the University of Manitoba’s Transport Institute. “It will back things up.”

Prentice said a service interruption lasting only days may not cause much damage, but a longer one would be a major concern for grain movement. The grain harvest usually wraps up in October, but this year much of it didn’t get done until this month because of earlier wet weather. Canada, one of the world’s leading exporters of spring wheat and the top shipper of canola and durum, relies more heavily on rail to move grain than other farming countries because of its vast distances to port.