Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to engage in this debate because we are beginning to give some scrutiny to an emerging industry. I say “emerging industry” because it has developed over the course of the last decade in a fashion that seems to be changing the world literally overnight.
We have been dealing with legislation such as this for quite some time. I can say that in principle we need to support a bill such as this, although I do not know that we would be as supportive of the amendment.
In the debate today, we have seen that people are looking at the dynamics of this industry. The dynamics, as my colleague from Malpeque has said, go through agriculture, industry, energy and the environment.
I know my colleague from Malpeque can speak for himself, as he always does and does so forcefully, but I know what he means when he talks about cheap food prices, et cetera. He is talking about the prices paid at the farm gate. He is not talking about, at least in the way I interpret it, in terms of the amount of money that a consumer must pay for products at the point of purchase. He is looking at a situation that sees equitable return on an investment made and contribution given.
I know there are agricultural groups around the country that are calling for the government to get its hands off and to allow market forces to drive the new economy. Everyone in this place is in favour of rewarding initiative and rewarding enterprise but we need to keep in mind the impact this kind of development will have on the structure around the world, the usual economic dynamics.
For example, my colleague from Selkirk—Interlake said earlier that this would only have an impact on 2% of the land mass of Canada. It is nice to throw out a figure like that, but 48% of the land mass in Canada is covered by forest and about another 46% is covered by ice. When we are talking about the rest that is arable, if we are looking at a 2% mass, are we not talking about the overall mass and, in which case, it would be an enormous amount of land dedicated to biomass and biofuel production, or are we talking only about 2% of the arable land already available in Canada?
I think that is significant because we are talking about food policies and their impact worldwide. I will reflect for a moment in a moment on energy and biomass and biofuel.
If we think for a moment about what has been happening around the world where, as I said in the previous question, South Africa is already being considered the Middle East of the biofuel production business, it has in excess of one billion acres already dedicated toward the production of biomass for biofuel. In a part of the world that is constantly looking for food aid, we can imagine what is happening to the food sources.
In fact, in countries around the world where the agricultural production is dependent upon rainfall for its water sources, production costs and food costs have now gone up by 50% over last year, and that rise is escalating. It is escalating at such a rate that UN agencies are already concerned, not only about the quantum of demand for food aid, but also the cost. Over the last year, costs have increased by 20%. One can just imagine the demand on all the countries that are engaged in attempting to provide food aid to the most needy when the land closest by is being dedicated to biomass and biofuel production.
We are going down that same road. In North America, for example, Nebraska has decided that it will use as its economic strategy an increase in the land utilized for corn or biomass and biofuel. Nebraska is dedicating an additional one million acres this year alone. It is already producing a billion gallons of ethanol per annum in order to feed the growing American demand, the American demand that has seen production plants increase from 100 to 150 last year and is expected to reach 450 plants in this coming year.
There will be a huge and constant demand as we cross over into environmental concerns and greenhouse gas emissions, especially in North America and in Europe where we see that 80% of personal energy consumption through vehicles takes place.
Of the 800 million vehicles on the road today, 70% of them are on roads in Europe or North American. As I said earlier on, when China and India begin to produce vehicles to meet a demand for an emerging middle class, it will equal North America and Europe.
Every time 10% of the population in India and in China buy a car, 200 million more vehicles will be on the road. Clearly, the demand on traditional energy sources, those greenhouse gas emitting sources, will be huge. It will be equally impressive on those new technologies that are emerging in the ethanol production and other biomass products.
I mentioned Brazil earlier on. My colleague on the opposite side made reference to Brazil as well. Brazil has 300 million acres dedicated to the production of biomass for the purpose of ethanol production. India already has 35 million acres dedicated to the same type of industry. Indonesia has 16 million acres. These are not places that we have traditionally associated with land utilization for the production of anything other than food.
My colleague from the NDP said a moment ago that they were doing it at the expense of the rain forest and the consequent result on multi-environment and on other issues associated with the depletion of rain forests, not only in the Amazon but everywhere else around the world.
We must deal with those pressures because they are closer to us today than we imagine. It is great to talk about the competitiveness and productivity of our own agricultural sector. We want our farmers to make more money but we want them to do it in terms of producing for the demand that is there in the world. For what? The first goal should be to provide, with all due respect to my colleague from Malpeque, cheap food or low cost, high quality food but not at the expense of the farmer. How many people would be in business if they could not get their money? We want them to do that but we also want them to be wary about the kinds of policies that may have implications for virtually everything else.
One area that I do not think has not been explored sufficiently is the true cost of the production of ethanol. Some of these factors, which we used to rain upon all the industrial enterprises not that long ago to include all the true inputs in industrial production, need to be applied to any kind of alternative energy sources.
However, we must develop the new technology for those energy sources. We need to build a green economy. We need to invest in innovation. We need to invest in the technologies that will make us not only competitive but environmentally friendly and conscious of the impact for greenhouse gas emissions.
However, we can never forget those who are less fortunate than us. As I said earlier on, over 40 million Americans who live below the poverty line will experience this year a 40% increase in the cost of their food.
In an environment where the economy is submitting to all the vagaries that we normally see in the cyclical economic environment, the last thing people need is to see the vulnerable, not only in North America, but everywhere else around the world, submit to the high pressures of excessive food costs at the expense of environmental issues, technological issues and international relations.
We owe it to ourselves in this kind of debate to ensure that our governments keeps their feet firmly to the ground and understand that the implications of amendments like this to a bill like this go well beyond the stated purpose of the debate in the House.