Mr. Speaker, Dr. Sein Win, the prime minister of Burma in exile, has talked to the Prime Minister of Canada and also Inter Pares, the NGO that delivers this aid to TBBC, and he has talked to CIDA about this.
I am imploring the government to make this money available so that children, women who are pregnant and lactating, and elderly people are not cut down to half a day's rice ration when all their other foods are cut off.
Canada has been supporting this since 1997. This could mean starvation for these people, especially when we hear that some of Burma's rice basket has been destroyed by the storms. However, instead of feeding the people on the verge of starvation, there are rumours that Burma could be exporting rice. No other country in the world now, except Thailand, is exporting rice.
The scarcity of food means that food prices go up. Ethanol from food production, not the other types I talked about, is therefore only one of the problems.
Certain parts of the world are having problems. Biofuel critics from as far away as Ethiopia, Mali, the Philippines and Paraguay warn Canadian lawmakers that western thirst for green fuels is costing human lives and that indigenous people in northern Argentina are dying of malnutrition as they lose their land to agriculture expansion.
In the United States oil prices have also contributed to the high cost of food. International speculation and drought in various parts of the world, including India and China, with their huge demand for both meat and grain products, all cause these huge price increases that are causing the world crisis.
In the United States there is a record amount of ethanol produced from corn, but there is also a record amount of corn being produced, so the production of both the food and the ethanol is going up.
All the bill would do is give the government the authority to make regulations. We have to be very careful to take into consideration the concerns of constituents who have written to all of us, not at this particular stage but at the stage where regulations are made.
The regulations have to go through the Canada Gazette twice. Our party will certainly be vigilant to ensure that when regulations are put in, they make sense, and cutting down greenhouse gases and providing sufficient agricultural production for the world are kept in a safe and fair balance.