Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to the amendment to Bill C-33 that has been brought forward by my colleague.
In spite of the comments made by the last speaker, it is crucial that oversight by parliamentarians be an integral part of this bill and of this process within the department. The prior speaker raised a number of issues that emphasize the need for that oversight. The NDP is going to support this bill. Should it go ahead and become law of the land, it will impose that additional responsibility on us as parliamentarians.
My experience on these reviews has been less than positive because we do not follow the law and we do not fulfill our responsibility as regularly as we should.
There are other ways of doing it. If the committee that is ultimately responsible for this review is not entirely capable of doing it, the responsibility can be assigned to a subcommittee made up of members of Parliament who are particularly interested and knowledgeable with regard to the use of ethanol and its progress, and the use of it in our economy. Even a smaller committee can be put into place as a subcommittee of the standing committee.
We need to do that because of a number of points that have already been made, and let me just reiterate some of those.
Just in the last year there have been increasing riots, and I use that term advisedly, around the world with regard to the cost of food. As the former speaker suggested, this is not just happening in the undeveloped world. There were riots in Italy earlier this year over the cost of pasta, which of course comes from various grains, and the cost of those grains had escalated dramatically, by more than 100% in some cases. That ultimately is reflected in the end product.
I can tell members about my experience in my riding in the county of Essex. The cost of corn has more than doubled in a little over 12 months. It is true that is great for corn producers. Farmers in my community who are producing corn by and large are very happy with the increase in price because for too many years it has been too low to cover their input costs and allow them to make a living from the farm.
This doubling of cost is now significantly impacting dairy farmers as well as several hog farms and a significant number of poultry farms in the county of Essex. These farmers need the same corn that is now being used for ethanol because of the plant over in Chatham. That ethanol is taking the cost of their inputs up dramatically.
They have to compete with that new market that values that corn much higher than they are able to meet, and I have to say that quite bluntly. The cost of their feed grain has gone up by more than 100% in less than a year. A small farming operation faces great difficulty when it is faced with such a significant increase in the cost of a key ingredient for their operation over a short period of time.
There have also been food riots in Asia and Africa. Some NGOs are coming back and asking for hundreds of millions of dollars more to meet the demand in refugee camps and other areas where there is drought or famine. That is a direct result of the very dramatic escalating costs in grains.
In terms of Asia, for instance, I am hearing reports that there are a number of countries where again the cost of grain, rice in particular, has more than doubled in less than a year's time. There does not seem to be an end. For some countries, the estimate is that it has more than tripled in the past year or year and a half. A good deal of this is being driven by the demands that we are putting on the supply of grain for the use of ethanol.
I will use another example. Shortly after the second world war, Brazil made the conscious decision not to run its vehicles on carbon-based products but on ethanol. It has a requirement that 50% of all the fuel used in vehicles comes from sugar. Last year, Brazil, for the first time, was forced to curtail the amount of production of sugar that would go into the sugar market because of the demand it had for ethanol.
There was a very strong reaction and I do not think using the word “riot” is too strong a term. There were a number of large demonstrations over the fact that the population of Brazil could not access as much sugar as it had historically. The reason for that was that it needed the sugar for the purpose of producing ethanol.
At the end of the day, when we look at this amendment, and although we have overall some reservations on the bill we are generally supportive of it, it begs the attention of the House on an ongoing basis, in a parliamentary committee, to continue to review the use of food products, grains in particular.
One of the other points I want to make is that the review would also allow us the opportunity to continue to bring forward alternatives in the use of ethanol. Instead of actually using the food product, we could use the stock and waste, including garbage, in a number of ways, but there is a need to develop the technology.
There is a company right here in Ottawa, Iogen, that has done some great work in this area. It is using a product that is not food. It is using straw and stalks from other grain such as corn, et cetera. There are other experiments going on and plants operating around the globe that are using, for instance, waste products from forestry and they are able to produce ethanol.
The other thing we have to be monitoring on an ongoing basis is the efficiency of this. If we are using food products and not achieving an efficiency ratio that is substantially better than carbon-based technology, then we have to look for those alternatives and develop those technologies.