Finance committee  Good morning. Canada is no longer walking with giants. We used to be able to count on giants in the world stage, like the U.S. and the U.K., to help us navigate global turmoil, but no longer. With global crises increasing, Canada must forge its own foreign policy responses. Ca

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you. As I was saying earlier, Canada committed to a certain amount of global food assistance in 2011, I think, or 2012. There was an international treaty on food assistance. The last time it was renegotiated was around 2012. Canada committed to a certain level. We have nev

Foreign Affairs committee  I think the obvious thing is that if people are hungry, they get angry and they riot in the streets. We did see that in 2009 and 2010. Even beyond that, we often are dealing with what we call “hidden hunger”. It's a situation, usually with children, when they are getting suffici

Foreign Affairs committee  I mentioned when I was speaking earlier what we refer to as negative coping strategies: You pull kids out of school and girls are getting married at age 12 because you can get a bride price; you sell off your livestock, but that means it's more difficult to recover afterwards; yo

Foreign Affairs committee  I'd like to remind the members that Canada is not isolated from the world. We depend on the world for trade. We're related to the world in terms of migration. We saw during COVID that we're all in one place when it comes to health issues. In terms of security issues, we've seen t

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, I would agree with that.

Foreign Affairs committee  That's beyond my expertise in terms of the sanctions of individuals, though my understanding is that much of the reduction in exports has had more to do with the questions around safety of moving goods across the Black Sea, which was addressed through the Black Sea grain initiati

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you. Yes, Canada is certainly able to provide aid. Canada is the largest donor of food assistance per capita in the world, which I am proud of as a food assistance person, and I believe you should be too. I think there's going to be an increase in that, because Canada set

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you. You're correct that this cut has definitely had an impact. I'll give you one very concrete example. My organization, the Canada Foodgrains Bank, does get support from the Canadian government to do humanitarian work, for which we're grateful. We recently put a prop

Foreign Affairs committee  There's definitely a role for multilaterals. Organizations like the World Food Programme, IFAD—the International Fund for Agricultural Development—and the FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization, are often working with national governments and putting in place countrywide stra

Foreign Affairs committee  You're right that in 30 seconds I'm not going to give you a whole lot of technology. Agriculture contributes to greenhouse gases, but agriculture's also a solution, notably the conservation agriculture that I talked about. You're incorporating more residues into the soil, and th

Foreign Affairs committee  I think you hit the nail on the head. It doesn't make sense for us to assume that we can feed the world from Canada. Canada's a huge exporter—will always be—and our farmers are doing a fantastic job, but the needs of the world are greater than that. Part of the problem we've had

Foreign Affairs committee  Would you mind repeating that question, please?

Foreign Affairs committee  We NGOs don't have that much leeway in terms of deciding where our funding goes because we are bound by the rules of where the funding comes from. We get a significant portion of our money from the Canadian government, for which we are grateful, but that, of course, comes with ce

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much for the invitation today. I'm going to focus specifically on food in countries other than Ukraine. Globally, we were winning the war on hunger for decades. More people were eating complete diets and fewer people were going hungry, but around 2018, we started