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Introduction



Marketing Boards are government involved ways of regulating farmer’s production and price, while protecting the overall profit of every farmer in that particular production. Since there is nothing farmers can do about the inelastic nature of the demand for farm products, the key to supporting and stabilizing farm prices and incomes lies in controlling the supply of farm products. In other words, farmers would benefit greatly from an oligopolistic (banning firms together) price and supply agreement among themselves. Farming is a highly competitive industry – it consists of many small, independent producers selling substantially similar products in a big marketplace.

Given these realities, it has proven very difficult to achieve any kind of agreement or coordinated action on the part of farmers, even when it would be in their best interest to do so. Attempts have been made to use farm cooperatives to restrict production and thus support and stabilize prices; however, these efforts rarely work. Such agreements are voluntary and lack means of enforcement; as a result, too many farmers don’t participate or break the agreements. This is when farmers turned to government assistance to help with their low and unstable incomes and marketing boards was proposed.

In the following we will discuss what marketing boards are, how they work, how they effect the Canadian economy, and how widespread they are. We will focus on particular Canadian producers who use marketing boards and how they are both positive and negative in contributing to the economy. We will also look at how marketing boards are effecting the consumers. In total outlook, the purpose of this review is to provide a clear and explicit focus for the research to be undertaken as well as to establish the scope of the study.














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