Foreign Affairs Committee on Dec. 4th, 2007

[Vivian Barbot, Bloc, Papineau, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for appearing before us today. I believe it is Mr. Mukusya who said that you are moving forward and making progress but that for every step forward you move one step back and are not getting anywhere. It must be extremely discouraging to see the results you achieve constantly threatened despite all the effort that went into them.

It is obvious — and in my mind, this is how things should be done — that there should be coordination between foreign aid, governments and the local people, knowing of course that peasants are often the last consulted. So I fully agree with you that Canada should make an effort in this regard because these people have experienced the situation, they have traditional knowledge of these problems and they can offer solutions.

However, when we talk about climate change, as you know, these impacts are beyond the grasp of individuals and of many States. Unfortunately, Canada is not doing very well in this respect from what we can see at the present time.

I wonder to what extent your respective governments, or the governments with whom you work, realize the enormity of the danger that hangs over mankind. And to what extent do they make a linkage between what is happening locally and the fact that at a global level there is not enough of an effort to reverse the situation?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Madame Barbot.

She referenced you, Mr. Mukusya. Did you want to respond to that?

[Joshua Mukusya]

Yes. It's a good question.

For sure, everybody knows there is climate change. But people want to make themselves indifferent. They know it is there, but they don't want to do anything.

For sure, our governments are doing their best, as the Canadian government is doing its best. But nobody is showing us the way forward to reverse these situations.

What I would say is that, because we realize that problem is coming.... We used to have two seasons in every 12 months, the long season being from March until June. It's no longer there. You get drizzles, and in some places you get nothing. Now we only depend on the short rains that come in November and December.

As I left home on the 18th, there was nothing. Probably they will start coming, but if after all the work we have done trying to prepare some communities that expect rain and get water, it does not turn up, they will have another, extra year of problems, not getting water and not getting food.

If experts could show us the way forward to reverse the situation, which we know is there, by telling us this is what we have to do to change the situation we are in, then we would be heading somewhere.

But as Mr. Clark mentioned, it is tied to many other things. And out of these many other things, as a nation and as citizens of the world, we need to find a solution as a team, because everybody has a nephew and another friend living somewhere. Even if it's in Africa, it will probably end up affecting Canada at one point in the process. Because there's a very gradual change, a lot of people don't see it.

Yes, the government is doing its best to tell people to plant trees. But just telling people to plant trees and not acting is not enough. We need to do the practical part of it: stick the plant in the ground, water it, and make sure it lives above the height of destruction by small animals.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Mukusya.

Madame Barbot, you wanted to have another minute or so.

[Vivian Barbot, Bloc, Papineau, QC]

Yes.

You know, trees are planted but it takes time for them to grow and the situation is urgent. To what extent is food aid that comes directly from abroad structured to fill the need while allowing people to become self-sufficient wherever that is possible?

[Mamby Fofana]

First of all, in the case of Sahelian countries, especially those of Western Africa, people are fully aware of climate change. They experience daily the effects of climate change and they adapt because climate fluctuations from one year to the next have become very frequent.

This year, winter rains came six weeks late. Cotton was supposed to be grown in a number of fields but the people, knowing that cultivated cotton is a hybrid that cannot adjust to climate, preferred planting local grains. These are photosensitive and photoperiodic and can adjust to the duration of winter rains. Adaptations are happening daily and people are perfectly aware because they are directly affected. Floods used to be rare in the Sahel, but this year there have been over 34 serious floods in Mali which affected 40,000 people. So it is true that climate change is here, it is experienced and understood by the people of the Sahel.

At the same time, here is the position of our governments. There is an obvious political will. Mali, for example, ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change on December 28, 2004 although it took effect only in March of the same year. This means that the country was indeed very quick to ratify the convention, but government capacity remains weak, there are few forecasting studies under way to try to anticipate the climate and the required adaptations and we know that in order to adapt we need knowledge of climatic trends.

Canada could contribute a lot in this regard also, but all this needs to be based on the traditional system of resilience and what people already know, rather than reinventing the wheel. We must build on what exists in order for the peasants who have the needs to take ownership of the measures. We are talking here about 80 percent of the population. When we help 80 percent of the population to mitigate the effects of climate change in their daily lives and to realize their potential this can be called combatting poverty.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

We'll move to the government side.

Mr. Obhrai.

[Deepak Obhrai, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much for coming. It's always good to hear from you.

I returned from Mali only two weeks ago and I met with our CIDA officials there who are doing a pretty good job of trying to meet the challenging needs in Mali.

I was also in Nairobi last year. Coming from east Africa myself--I grew up in Arusha--I am aware of the complexities that are in Kenya and in east Africa in reference to the challenges faced by farmers.

Today you have alluded to climate change and its impact on food security, which you have eloquently illustrated. But one has to understand that climate change affects everyone, including Canada. So Canada itself has the same challenge that Africa is having but we have a stronger capacity to deal with it. There is less capacity in Africa to deal with it.

Hence, it's a cooperative effort between NGOs, the government, the farmers and everybody working together, as you rightly pointed out. So it is not an easy solution that is to be addressed tomorrow. On climate change, it's a longer-term solution that will highlight it.

I'm looking at the immediate impact here and saying that one of the factors on this, Mr. Clark of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, is helping the food security in Africa. We send food from here and we tie it down.

We are thinking of what might happen if we untied the food aid and allowed the aid to be addressed internally. Sometimes there is a bumper crop and sometimes there is a low crop, but using the internal economy of the country itself to address the security need rather than coming from here, would the Canadian Foodgrains Bank think this could be one of the positive features addressing a long-term security issue?

My second question is this. Specifically coming from east Africa, corn is a very important staple in the African diet. A report that came from the UN talked about using corn and everything for biofuel, having a negative impact on food security, specifically for countries in Africa and in Latin America. What do you think of that?

I would like to hear from you on these two questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Obhrai.

Mr. Clark, then Madam Walsh.

[Stuart Clark]

I'll speak briefly to the question of untying food aid. In fact, if some of you were here when we spoke before 2005, it was an issue that we frequently brought as a desirable policy change.

The Canadian Foodgrains Bank, indeed the farmers who support the Canadian Foodgrains Bank--and there are many thousands of them--were solidly behind the idea of further untying Canada's food aid budget.

So in 2005, in a deal I would have to say struck a little bit between the Canadian Federation of Agriculture and the Canadian Foodgrains Bank in the negotiations around this, Canada untied 50% of our food aid.

I believe there have been subsequent internal moves within government, to look at further untying that food aid budget. I'm not sure where that stands.

But I do want to say that there's a sense in which procuring food aid in developing countries is seen as the gold standard. I think we need to stop and listen to what we've just heard about climate change, because in the past when there's been a food crisis it has usually been possible to obtain food somewhere fairly close by. During the Ethiopian famine in 1984, that was definitely the case.

However, with the kind of seasonal variations we get now, it's very likely that we will have regional crop failures. We don't want to slam the door on the possibility of being able to send food from those areas whose agricultural productivity is expected to rise in the short term, including Canada.

So while there is often good sense untying this food aid because it has a good benefit in developing countries, we need to keep the possibility of sending food aid from Canada in the tool box, because there will be times when that will fit.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Clark.

Madam Walsh.

[Susan Walsh]

Just on the biofuels issue, that is a bit of a silver-bullet approach to climate change, we feel. I think we are very concerned that there will be a shift from feeding people to feeding cars.

The UNDP just came out with its Human Development Report that focuses on climate change. They state there that if all of the food crops were replaced by fuel crops, it still would only feed 20% of our crude oil energy demands.

Clearly we feel that e have to be very careful on that one. If we start to shift and further undermine the ability of farmers to grow food for their families through this new idea that this can somehow solve our problems of energy needs, we're in for some real problems there.

So we're very much wanting a very critical look at that whole new shift towards biofuels.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

Mr. Obhrai.

[Deepak Obhrai, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Clark, for speaking about the untying.

I want to hear from the Malians and the Kenyans about what they think about untying food and the local market conditions.

[Joshua Mukusya]

I would first say that the idea is wonderful. If we can have biofuel that can enable the rural communities to light their houses without going far afield, that is a wonderful idea. But if we think of a nation like Kenya, where only 20% of that land is productive, and the rest is not, if by any chance anybody goes beyond producing food and turns fields for food to biofuel, then you are telling the local poor people they are finished and they are gone. We should by all means watch, and keep on watching.

It has been in the news all over that a new crop is coming. It's promoted highly. But still in the village we don't think it is going to be the same thing as we had through growing coffee and having no food, and getting nothing out of it.

So I think it's not the best. It is a good idea, but it is not for the farmers. It's probably for the large-scale farms, for people who have other alternatives.

I'm not part of promoting that, and I don't think the community we are involved in is about that, because we have not gained from coffee, where we expected to sell something and get money to buy food and run our small projects.

It is only an idea because the world is desperate for other things. I still feel we have a long way to go before we can sink to that.

[Deepak Obhrai, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

Mr. Fofana, quickly.

[Mamby Fofana]

Thank you.

Concerning food aid, I think planning food in advance has to be avoided, because in cases of good production internally that can negatively affect food prices and farmers' incomes. In cases of extreme food shortage, food aid is compulsory because it can help, but the best way to help people is to help them grow their own food.

I was saying that 80% of the population is dealing with farming—not as a food source only, but as employment, as a source of life, as a source of recovering their dignity. If you are no longer able, as in the case of a Douentza elder, to provide food to a family, this is a shame. You lose your dignity. It is important to make people recover their dignity by helping them to grow their own food. This is better than food aid.

Concerning biofuel, I can go not for biofuel but for some native trees such as the gum arabic tree, which is native to the Sahelian countries and which can be planted and can help sequestrate carbon, even if our problem is not emissions. All the emissions are sequestrated, and we are even helping other places--like Canada--to sequestrate carbon. It is important in that case that Canada reduce its emissions, but help us also to develop family-based farming—for justice, because if you are helping 80% of the population, this is justice.

For instance, Jatropha curcas is a plant that is now being permitted, but it is very exigent. It is not soil-tolerant or drought-tolerant. This means that it could compete with cereals to occupy the very fertilized lands. This can be problematic. We can go with drought-tolerant tree species that are native, but not Jatropha, for instance, which comes from Latin America.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Fofana.

The last question will go to Madam McDonough.

[Alexa McDonough, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much to the Food Security Policy Group once again for your ongoing leadership, and to our partners from the global south for bringing living, breathing examples of why we need to take seriously the kinds of recommendations you've placed before us yet again today.

I'm not sure whether you all are familiar with the fact that there was, for a time, a Canadian climate change development fund specifically crafted to focus on the punishing effects of climate change and remedial mitigation programs...on developing countries where agriculture, as you've pointed out, is 80% of the economic base—for example, in countries that you represent.

That program, I think, was considered to be quite visionary initially. Unfortunately, the previous government allowed it to expire, and it now no longer exists. I'm wondering whether particularly our guests from the global south had any experience with that program in their countries and whether one of the things we should be doing is looking at relaunching a similar program.

Secondly, thank you for pointing out the really quite alarming reduction in the resources allocated for the agricultural programs under CIDA that have been seen in the past, I think, to be quite important. I'm wondering whether you can comment specifically on whether it is your feeling that the recommendations from this committee to the government should be around stepping up those specific funds or whether your recommendations would be primarily around particular programs that we should be advancing and advocating.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Madam McDonough, and welcome back.

Mr. Clark.

[Stuart Clark]

I think the first question was whether either of our guests had experience with the climate change development fund. I have to say I'm drawing a little bit of a blank on it, but they may know something about it.

Have you heard about it, either of you?

[Joshua Mukusya]

I have not heard a word.

[Mamby Fofana]

I know that CIDA has funded a climate change program with AGRHYMET, which is part of an interstate committee on drought and desertification in west Africa. But this is an original organization. Otherwise, I don't know of any other supports that came from this special fund.

[Alexa McDonough, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Thank you.