Let me take your last question first. Under the previous support that the industry benefited from in its early stages, there was the excise tax exemption federally; that was 10¢ for ethanol and 4¢ for biodiesel. That excise tax exemption, Mr. Easter, as you know, applied to both domestically produced and any imported biofuels that come into the marketplace.
The CRFA has been quite adamant in its efforts over the course of the last several years in saying to government that a more useful approach to benefiting the development of the industry in Canada would have that excise tax exemption replaced by a direct producer payment program, meaning that the level of support enjoyed from government would find its way directly to the biofuels producer.
Imported biofuels, of course, don't benefit from that production subsidy any longer. With the removal of the excise tax exemption, which is set to take place April 1 of this year, and in moving to the $1.5 billion ecoENERGY for Biofuels program, I think we address that issue quite directly.
With respect to the issue of food versus fuel, there is a significant amount of data and information that I can share with the committee. Let's look at a couple of examples.
A UN report by Nobel Prize-winning Dr. Amartya Sen pointed out a decade ago that insufficient food is not the challenge facing the developing world. The notion that we are somehow trading food for fuel, quite frankly, is a myth. The systematic problem we're having in a developing world has to do with low income, unemployment, marketing distorting trade, and subsidy agreements. These can be corrected, as he states, through strong governing institutions, reliance on open markets, solid infrastructure, and sound public policy.
If you look at where biofuels are going and where the demand for food is going, we use a very little amount of food—corn and grains, as an example—in biofuels production right now. So as you've suggested, the impact that is happening has nothing to do with the growth of the biofuels market.