You seek Oda. Brave Jedi is She

[bcholmes]

My cow-orker mentioned to me an announcement by International Development Minister Beverley Oda. Oda is the minister responsible for the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), which I've been following because of its fishy role in Haiti.

The announcement is okay. Canada is giving more food to more people. Haiti will get $10 million. The one part that seems, on face value, to be interesting is that we're going to untie food aid. What that means is that Canadian agencies who get their money from CIDA (such as, for example, the Canadian Feed the Children organization that I donate to) will not be required to buy a certain amount of their food directly from Canadian farmers. My initial read of that is that it sounds like a good thing, but I'd like to see how it plays out (if the US sells us the food, it'll look a bit fishy, for example).

Today, at around 4:45, I read stories in the online forms of the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. A passage in the latter of those two articles stood out to me: a suggestion that a big cause for the rising price of food relates directly efforts at ethanol/biofuel production (which is a big U.S. initiative). The paragraph talked about how Beverley Oda avoided the topic during her announcement.

We had a bit of a conversation in our project room about how ethanol is a very inefficient fuel: it takes far more fossil fuel (in the form of fertilizer) to create the crops from which you derive the ethanol than you'd save by switching a vehicle from gas to ethanol. Our project manager suggested that this is an exercise driven by the wheat lobby, and I buy that.

Half an hour later, I went back to those two articles and that passage was gone. There's another article in the Globe on this topic, but the paragraph has been removed from the original article.

Edit: it looks like the latter article was written by one of the authors of the original piece. Perhaps the author decided to break the point out into a separate story.

Comments

[mvt.livejournal.com]

There was something on " As it Happens" that demand has not got up as much as said but that it is the commodities market that is driving the price change.
What is also sad is the subsidy paid to farmers in the US to grow corn that cannot be used that is not good for food but the payoff for the farmer is the subsidy. growing it

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

Interesting contrast. I get most of my news from the Beeb, and there, the link between food costs and biofuel production has been getting tons of coverage. It's been in the headlines for at least a week, maybe even two.

Is it only now making an appearance in the Canadian press?