The whole “food for fuel” thing really became a red herring in the media a year ago. Science is galloping ahead, especially on biofuels, and we'll be at a point pretty soon when it won't be economical to do anything except on a cellulosic basis anyway. The cellulosic bacteria are at a pretty advanced level now and on a month-by-month basis are galloping ahead. Let's face it. We in Canada are probably not the ones who will be doing the cellulosic stuff anyway, since there are tons and tons of this stuff being produced in Brazil just as waste product.
But the one thing about biofuel.... It's ironic, because it ties back into what we were talking about concerning competitiveness. One of the solutions that's been proposed is that we just need to do what the U.S. and the EU do: pour a bunch of money into agriculture that's there every year to support our farmers. The problem is, as Brian said, that this becomes capitalized within a couple of years into the programs. The Americans have found this. I've talked to a lot of guys down in the States who were involved in the initial stages of it, and they have said they really thought it would be the panacea. They were getting money from.... They used to joke, “I just about went broke last year: my mailbox fell down, and I couldn't get the money from the government.” Then all of a sudden they didn't talk about its being an advantage any more, because it all became capitalized into the price of their land, into the price of all their inputs, and into the price of everything. So they lost that margin again, and now they need to have the government payment or they won't survive.
In Canada, we have never had that payment, so it hasn't been capitalized in. I won't call it an advantage—we're having to compete with those guys. For years we had American prices because of their subsidies depressing the price we were getting for grain. When biofuel came into the States, it rerouted the U.S. Farm Bill into their secure fuel policy, and we finally saw closer access to world prices in Canada for our feed grains—for barley, etc.—and for our oilseeds, with canola. That had something to do with the price rise we saw.
Indirectly, biofuels helped us in the States by routing their subsidy money, in a way, out of destroying pricing. And that's really the key: if we don't have direct price signals, as a farmer I can't make proper decisions.