Thank you very much for the invitation. Again, my name is Pierre Desrochers. I'm an associate professor of geography at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. The remarks I prepared for you were co-produced with my colleague Joanna Szurmak, who is an electrical engineer and information specialist by training. I did send you images but I cannot unfortunately display them on the screens today, so I hope you have the images with you. With apologies to the translators, I will describe my talk around the images rather than follow the script that I sent you.
Obviously there are three points that I want to address. The first is climate change, considered in broad, historic terms, and then soil and water conservation.
If you look at the third image, you see that the point I want to make should be an obvious one. It is that climate has always changed. Whenever we go back in the geological record, we see that climate has changed in the recent past. Obviously, if we had tried to schedule this meeting here 20,000 years ago, which is really a blip in terms of geological time, we would have had a minor problem as we would have had to deal with a glacier that was nearly two kilometres thick. Again, that's only 20,000 years ago; that's nothing.
Because climate changes all the time, the next image shows you that climate change is a consideration for every generation. I have some quotes from The New York Times. In 1895, people thought that another glacial period was about to begin. In 1952, it was a “Next Great Deluge” because the ice cap was going to melt. Then in 1959, we have “Rising World Heat”. In 1974, the “Ocean Will Soon Be an Open Sea”. Again, climate changes all the time and every generation rediscovers the problem.
If you go back to the past, you used to throw virgins into volcanoes or else you would burn more witches as the climate was changing. People have always blamed themselves for climate change, but a few things to keep in mind in the context of this committee is that if you look at the majority of models that have been made in the recent past, they all tend to predict favourable outcomes for Canada. That's because obviously more heat and more CO2 will benefit most growing regions in the country. In terms of formulating policy, I believe this is a general consideration that we should keep in mind.
The next image is about the increase of corn yields historically. The point I want to make is that it doesn't matter what the climactic change trend is. As long as you have economic development, agriculture tends to prosper. You can see that you got very few bushels per acre when Europeans showed up in North America, but then, whether you had cooling or warming trends, yield tended to increase. You can see the big spike, the sort of hockey stick. The blade begins really with the development of hybrid corn in the 1920s, and it goes up whether the climate is warming or cooling.
One thing that people tend to forget today is that there was actually a cooling trend between 1945 and 1975, roughly, which is why people used to worry about global cooling in the 1970s. If we were to stretch that line today, we're at roughly, these last few years, about 160 bushels per acre in terms of corn, so again warming or cooling, agriculture tends to become more productive.
What we observe also for agricultural production is that we produce more and more food on less and less land. These are American data, but you could see similar results, perhaps not as spectacular but the same trend, in most countries. You can see that corn production has been going through the roof these last few years, but the amount of land used to produce it has decreased overall. Again, warming or cooling, we produce a lot more food on a lot less land.
Just so that you don't believe that I'm making up data, I have again this cute little graph from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations that shows that in agriculture, as in every business, it always makes sense to do more with less. Whatever line of agricultural work you look at, you produce more outputs using less inputs. You don't need any government policy to do that. You just need old-fashioned competition where people have an incentive, again, to use their inputs as efficiently as possible.
The key point I want to make in the committee is that many people have declared a war on carbon fuel and petroleum products today and we view only their negative effect. But none of these advances would have been possible without a heavy diet of carbon fuels to power the engines that make this progress possible or else petroleum products, everything from plastics to seed coating to irrigation systems. Petroleum products were absolutely essential in achieving those results.
The longer document deals with this issue in more detail than the little summary that you might have, but historically, climate change has not really been a problem for farmers. The problem is singular weather events. Again, you have pictures of drought, frost, and floods. This is historically what really has been problematic for agricultural production, and this is why, throughout human history, you've had famine and malnutrition everywhere, either in the tropics or in temperate regions. It was only long-distance transportation, meaning at first steamships and railroads, that put an end to famine, at least for the advanced parts of our planet, as the surplus of regions that had good years could be shipped economically and in large enough quantities to regions that had bad years.
Again, we take our agricultural system for granted. Today, we don't worry about famine and malnutrition, but again, this would not have been achieved without carbon fuels, and trying to go cold turkey without modern technologies would obviously be a problem.
Another thing that we should keep in mind is that farmers have to adapt all the time, climate change or not, and I would argue that, in the grander scheme of things, climate change is a minor consideration compared with economic considerations. For example, there has been a lot of adaptation in the tobacco belt in Ontario, because people smoke less tobacco than in the past, but you might have diseases or you might have competitors emerging in other regions.
I know that some of you are from out west, so pulse production in this country is a nice success story. It's an opportunity that emerged and proved better than other alternatives. Again, just for economic reasons, or perhaps because you're dealing with pests or better competitors, as a farmer, you have to adapt all the time, and climate change in that context, in terms of adaptation, I believe, is a minor consideration.
The next image is about ethanol. Before creating new policies, I would suggest that we consider repealing bad ones, and I believe that a lot of things that have been put forward in the name of fighting climate change—