March 3, 2010

GGA seeks to attract grain companies in western Australia

The Grain Growers Association (GGA) wants to expand its West Australia (WA) membership base and play a leading role in the provision of industry services, for the deregulated Australian wheat export market.

GGA CEO Peter 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.

"We still have equity in GrainCorp but we are absolutely independent," he said. "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."

"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," he added.

Financially the GGA is in a strong position with 17,000 members, all grain growers. However, it only has about 50 members in WA.

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."