The following in an excerpt from a speech Alex made in the House of Commons on April 17, 2008.
39th PARLIAMENT, 2nd SESSION
EDITED HANSARD • NUMBER 081
…a number of issues have to be addressed in the area of food sovereignty. Next week, for example, I will be in the small community in my riding of Princeton with a group of people who work on the issue of food security in their community. We will show a film called, TABLELAND, and have a discussion on what this means to that community.
When we get back on April 30, there is going to be an evening in Ottawa, where people will be coming together to talk about the wrong direction the world is going in regard to biofuels and the fallacy of that whole argument.
If we look at Canada’s food sovereignty and security and, for example, if we look at the question of peak oil, the industrial agricultural model in Canada was built on, and is heavily dependent on it, our low dollar, as well as the abundant and cheap energy for transportation to market, fertilizer and chemical inputs. These conditions no longer exist and are likely to get worse, making this system unsustainable.
What we are now facing in the pork industry is partly as a result of this. The fact is input costs have gone up, the dollar is low and we have had this free market model to produce with free trade, moving it back and forth as much as possible. Yet the European Union has a quota of 0.5%. Over that, our producers have to pay a tariff to get into that market. At the same, as an aside, at the World Trade negotiations we are being pushed to increase the quota so we can allow more products imported into our country.
Clearly something is not right in the direction we are going. It is time for all of us to look at the idea of our food sovereignty, food security and safety, as we address the crisises that keep come up. Hopefully we can have a plan in place to avert this when they come up. The strong dollar makes our exports too expensive for others to buy. More purchasing power to import food makes us dependent on others for our food supply.
The whole issue of climate change, which we are all aware of and on which we all agree, is increasing drought conditions. We have refugees and resource wars because of this. We have rising commodity prices, which are disproportionately affecting the poor. On top of this, we have the biofuel industry in North America and in other parts of the world, which is not the main reason but one of the reasons that prices of food commodities are going up.
As an example, in the United States farmers are taking away land from soybean production and increasing the land on which they are cultivating corn for biofuels. This means that the effect in Brazil is farmers are planting more soybeans to keep the quota in the world, displacing cattle ranchers from their land to get more land for soybean production. The cattle ranchers are moving into the rain forests and cutting down the forests so they can have land for cattle grazing.
We are getting this spin off effect happening. This in turn is displacing poor people who have been subsistence farmers, in Brazil for example, into the cities. We then have the whole effect of urbanization and migration into the cities.
We see the effect with the NAFTA among Mexico, Canada and the United States. As of January of this year, there has been a free flow of corn across the border. Mexican farmers are not able to compete. They are going broke, so they are leaving their farms, going to the bigger cities and migrating to the United States to work for menial jobs, probably on the black market somewhere, to make a living.
It is time now that we look at the whole industrial model of agriculture. It is time we look at a way of having sustainable communities.
I was in Saskatchewan a few weeks ago and met with some folks who were concerned about the state of agriculture in their province and in Canada. They are saying that they need a policy that looks at not only how they can make the farm more efficient and larger to compete, regardless of our dollar, and keep it moving in that direction. They also need a policy that looks at each community and how they can attract people into the community who can farm, who can have a farm on the outskirts of a small community, for example like Blaine Lake, where my family members grew up.
As well, we need to not only have that community there for farmers, but we need to have affordable housing and a community that is sustainable and able, within the parameters of the community, to feed itself and also feed people in that province and in Canada.
As we move on and look at the way the whole agricultural industrial model is developing, I predict that we will see, and we see it now, more people moving back to rural Canada and who want to work on sustainable farms.
In my area of the West Kootenays, we have an area just across the mountains, called the Creston Valley, wherein folks are now going to start growing wheat again because there is a demand for it in cities like Nelson and in the West Kootenays, keeping in mind the whole idea of food sovereignty and the 100 mile diet. We see this as a model.
I had mentioned also the whole area of biofuel production. I have many concerns in regard to the current legislation before us. I regret that the amendments I had for Bill C-33 in committee were not passed.
I will read the amendments because I think that had they been passed by our committee and approved by Parliament, we could have more of a sustainable direction in the area of biofuel production.
The first amendment rejected was: —prohibiting the use of genetically modified grains, oilseeds or trees for biofuel production, except for those genetically modified grains, oilseeds or trees that were used for biofuel production in Canada before 2008…
In other words, what I wanted to have put in with this amendment was that we are not going to give a green light to genetically modified wheat, which in turn would have that contamination effect, would lower the quality and would lower our prestige in the world.
The second amendment I wanted to have put in was: –prohibiting the use of lands protected by federal legislation and other sensitive biodiverse lands for biofuel production;…
The third one rejected was: –preserving the biodiversity of lands used in biofuel production;…
The fourth one rejected was: –prohibiting the importation of grains or oils for use in biofuel production;…
Last week, an editorial in the Manitoba Co-operator stated that Husky Oil in Lloydminster, Saskatchewan, and in Minnedosa, initially was going to rely upon locally grown wheat, second quality wheat, which fits in with the Manitoba government’s policy of 10% of land devoted to biofuels. However, because of the prices in the grain industry, farmers are not taking the company up on this. The article said that the company is going to be using corn exclusively, because it is complicated to go back and forth between wheat and corn for ethanol production.
The corn now is grown in eastern Canada, of course, but there is also a biofuel industry initiative in eastern Canada. The fact is that the corn now will have to be imported into Manitoba to sustain Husky Oil. Our farmers really will not be taking part in this industry initiative unless they happen to work at that plant.
The other amendment I wanted to put in was this one: establishing criteria in relation to the environmental sustainability of biofuel production to ensure compliance with internationally recognized best practices that promote the biodiversity and sustainability of land, air and water, and also to establish restrictions on the use of arable land in Canada for biofuel production to ensure that biofuel production does not have a detrimental impact on food supply in Canada and in foreign countries.
Now we come to the argument about food for fuel. I think it is a very logical statement that there is land in the world today that is being taken out of food production to sustain a biofuels industry. Recent research, not only here in North America but in the world, shows that taken in a general context, biofuel production does nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. By the time we have taken the input energy, the transportation energy and the energy to power the biofuel plants, it becomes unsustainable when we look at it from the point of view of the environment.
I am not sure if members are aware of this, but the hon. member for Malpeque and others of us on the committee went to Washington. We were told by the Americans that they are pushing the biofuels industry in the United States because they have a cap on their imports. They are pushing it because they need more fuel to “fuel” that rising demand. That will come from biofuels produced in their country at the expense of farming.
In summary, I think now is the time for us to take another look at this and to have a new direction in the area of agriculture. I believe that the whole issue of food sovereignty and food security tied in with sustainable farming communities is the direction we should be taking.
Tags: food security