AS THE week’s world headlines connecting the demand for ethanol grain feedstock with political instability and starvation became more extreme, questions in the House of Commons became more critical of government support for the biofuel industry.
And political parties, including the governing Conservatives, were exhibiting a split personality on the issue, balancing biofuel boosters with skeptics.
In Washington last weekend, International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn warned of catastrophe if food prices keep rising. Ministers from IMF countries had said using foodstuffs to make fuel is “a crime against humanity.”
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In Washington, the International Food Policy Research Institute issued a report calling on developed world governments to quit subsidizing domestic biofuel industries and to allow low-cost producers like Brazil to fill national demand.
“Biofuel subsidies in the United States and ethanol and biodiesel subsidies in Europe have proven to be misguided policies that have distorted world food markets,” it said.
In Canada’s Parliament, the biofuel skeptics began to replace the biofuel boosters.
Bloc Québécois MPs pressed the government April 10 to commit to more foreign aid to deal with the increasing difficulty poor populations around the world are having buying food.
Veteran MP Francine Lalonde pressed the government to rethink its multibillion-dollar support for the biofuel industry.
“The past few days have served as an example of the threats to humanity if the world insists on developing biofuels to the detriment of basic food production.”
There have been food riots in Haiti and panic by many world governments.
Agriculture minister Gerry Ritz was having none of it. It is full steam ahead for support of biofuel development, he told the Commons.
“Our subsidization of a beginning biofuels industry in Canada has had very little effect on the foodstuffs here,” he said, which did not deal with the broader question of world food price increases. “We do have the innovation and the market capacity to feed both the food and the fuel line.”
Had the opposition been a bit more mischievous, or perhaps a bit sharper, they would have directed the questions specifically to a Ritz cabinet colleague who sits on the government front bench 15 seats south of the agriculture minister.
International co-operation minister Bev Oda (who may not have answered the question anyway), through the Canadian International Development Agency, is helping fund a national speakers tour in late April for folks who are on Lalonde’s side in this debate.
“The corporate agrofuels gold rush has ignited a major global conflict,” says the promotion for speakers from nine countries. “Governments across the world are committing to agrofuels as a part of their energy strategies but producing crops for fuel is already changing world agriculture, with major consequences for people, ecosystems and the planet.”
The announcement comes with this thank you: “This event is made possible with the aid of a grant from CIDA.”
For consistency-of-message purposes, Ritz and Oda might want to have a chat over breakfast cooked in GMO canola oil.
