 Canada to answer urgent UN plea for food aid OTTAWA - Canada could double the food aid money it has provided so far this year to the World Food Program in response to an urgent plea from the United Nations.Commentsview comments in forum Page 1 2 You need to be a member of CKA and be logged into the site, to comment on news. |
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I'm not in a big hurry to bail out the UN again over anyting.
Know who said that Rain?
The government needs to smarten up and provide these people a decent location to live. If it will cost about $200 million to rebuild reserve housing, health and economic programs along with public safety, education and community services, why would they not do this on higher ground?
A "silent tsunami" is not a tsunami at all.
So who, after all, speaks today for the hungry?
bail out
"Under the 1999 Food Aid Convention, Canada is committed to providing the United Nations World Food Program with the dollar equivalent of 420,000 metric tonnes of wheat annually."
We can provide what we said we would and sell the surplus but who pays the farmers?
I'm not against emergency air for things like tsunami or earthquake victims but countries that have been starving for a decade really need to fix themselves.
There's an old Reform saying that goes "If you make a man a fire, he will be warm, but if you set him on fire.. no wait, that's not it...
A hungry man has the (natural) right to steal his food and if he is threatened he has the right to kill. A Conservative should know this basic conservation rule.
There's an old Reform saying that goes "If you make a man a fire, he will be warm, but if you set him on fire.. no wait, that's not it...
We can provide what we said we would and sell the surplus but who pays the farmers?
I'm not against emergency air for things like tsunami or earthquake victims but countries that have been starving for a decade really need to fix themselves.
The issue isn't quantity but cost.
I guess that for subsistance farmers like yourself then the cost of food isn't an issue for you.
There's an old Reform saying that goes "If you make a man a fire, he will be warm, but if you set him on fire.. no wait, that's not it...
We can provide what we said we would and sell the surplus but who pays the farmers?
I'm not against emergency air for things like tsunami or earthquake victims but countries that have been starving for a decade really need to fix themselves.
The issue isn't quantity but cost.
It would be about cost if the production/distribution costs of food were responsible for the prices' increases.
There's an old Reform saying that goes "If you make a man a fire, he will be warm, but if you set him on fire.. no wait, that's not it...
We can provide what we said we would and sell the surplus but who pays the farmers?
I'm not against emergency air for things like tsunami or earthquake victims but countries that have been starving for a decade really need to fix themselves.
The issue isn't quantity but cost.
It would be about cost if the production/distribution costs of food were responsible for the prices' increases.
The poorest people in the world feel the effects first and worst.
Production and distribution costs are partly responsible. Have you seen the price of gas lately?
Gasoline with 10% ethanol does not reduce the price of gas or help the environment because you get worse milage. Ethanol production is a waste of electricity and farm land.
Food feeds our livestock. The price of meat is going up.
A growing middle class in China and India is eating more meat. So they need more livestock and those animals have to eat.
Many nations don't have a diverse range of food crops, instead focusing on a crop that they can trade for the staples and still make a nice profit.
I seriously hope this will make people reconsider having more than 2 children. Why are you having kids when you can barely feed them?
Apr 26, 2008 04:30 AM
Thomas Walkom
Some countries face a food crisis. This country does not.
True, the prices of basic foodstuffs are going up. But for Canada, and arguably even for some poor countries, this is not necessarily a bad thing.
Recall that, in historical terms, food is cheap. For Canadians, it is probably cheaper than it has ever been.
Thanks to mechanized production and the widespread use of chemical fertilizers, farmers can produce crops at bargain-basement prices.
Between 1997 and 2005, the cost of living in Canada rose by 18 per cent.
During the same period, the price of Canadian farm products fell by 3 per cent.
So, that's the first point. Even if the price of bread continues to rise, Canadians won't starve.
The second point is that others may.
Rising food prices are causing riots in places like West Africa not just because these countries are poor but because their inhabitants have no access to other sources of food.
And the reasons for that, ironically, are linked to the same forces of trade and globalization that make food for Canadians so cheap.
In theory, there is nothing wrong with trade or globalization. But both have evolved in dangerous ways. Monoculture has allowed poorer nations to focus on cash crops for export. But it has also made many far less self-sufficient in food.
Thanks to this global specialization, Thailand and Vietnam together account for almost half of the world's rice exports. In West Africa, farmers have abandoned subsistence agriculture to specialize in valuable exports crops like cocoa. You drink my cheap cocoa; I eat your cheap rice. In theory, everyone should be ahead.
In fact, many countries have moved ahead. But global specialization works only if the links of trade remain intact. When they are disrupted, the whole thing breaks down.
The current disruption in the global food chain is blamed on a host of factors. High oil prices have raised transport and fertilizer costs. A drought in Australia, one of the world's top 10 rice producers, has created a shortage of that commodity.
Others finger the global food system itself. In an interview with Vancouver's Strait.com, Montreal food researcher Devlin Kuyek argues that monoculture made Vietnam's rice crop more susceptible to the diseases that have devastated that country's harvest in the past three years.
Yet, in a sense, the reasons are immaterial. The point is that we have created a global food system that is shockingly vulnerable to disruption.
Agricultural self-sufficiency went out of vogue after World War II. It may now become fashionable again.
Not in Canada though. In this country, governments are firmly wedded to the notion that if others can do it more cheaply Canadians shouldn't bother.
Even as the world frets about an international food crisis, the Ontario and federal governments pay farmers to cut down their fruit trees and eliminate their swine herds.
Indeed, farmers who want government compensation for killing swine must ensure that the pigs they slaughter don't end up sold for food. If this seems perverse, that's because it is.
Finally, a silver lining: London's Financial Times reports that many Afghan farmers are planning to plant fewer opium poppies. The reason? Now that bread prices are rising, they figure they can make more money selling wheat than supplying the heroin addicts of Vancouver's downtown east side.