A friend of mine is very much into “sustainability.”
I don’t mean sustainability in terms of being sensible and not wearing-out or exhausting systems or supplies of something, but “sustainability” meaning the cultish belief that everything to do with modern stuff is “unsustainable” and that anything done outside of the West and that is more primitive is more “sustainable.” It’s an interesting outlook some folks have, because they’ll rail against carbon emissions from places like Canada, but not bat an eye at places like China or India, that open new coal-fired power plants continuously. They also tend to denounce trade in food from places like Canada, because we are rich and (still mostly) white and therefore must be hurting the oppressed overseas people who are buying our stuff, but they support export trade from developing countries to us, because those places need to develop their economies.
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It’s a bit of a mish-mash of assumptions, with lots of contradictions, but it makes some people feel better about themselves by saying we in the West are BAD and most everyone else is GOOD. Joy through self-flagellation. We are sinners and we need to purge ourselves.
I don’t argue with people’s religious beliefs, so I don’t tend to bother engaging this stuff, other than to note – as I have recently with my friend – that we live in a part of the world (the cold, northern, brutal part) that is too sparsely populated to provide a domestic market big enough to absorb the vast crops that the prairies can produce, so if we chose to create a world in which all food had to be grown and then consumed within a 100 mile radius, we’d be turning most of the prairies back to grass and shutting down most of the agriculture business. And if we also stopped exporting our other resources, there wouldn’t be much need at all for many people up here in the north. There wouldn’t be anything for us to do. So maybe we’d all move to Jamaica and live a subsistence life. Hopefully the Jamaican’s would be OK with millions of us showing up to live a more sustainable life in the Caribbean.
Obviously I think this kind of thinking is pretty silly and shallow, but it’s the kind of thinking many people in our society have, never realizing how crucial trade is to us, and how we are and have always been a trading people.
The preceding rant is just preamble to what I really want to write about here today, which is the vast importance and complexity of export trade for our farm economy here in the West, something that was made once more starkly obvious yesterday and the day before at the Canada Grains Council annual meeting.
From expanding elevator storage capacity on the prairies to better port facilities to improved trade access with overseas markets, we really have built Canada into an impressive exporting machine. Most of our industries wouldn’t survive without the export market and we have taken
