Canadian Wheat
Clearly, there are some resources that are fungible and some that are not. There are some resources that will eventually peter out, and some that can be renewed indefinitely ... as long as circumstances permit. There are some resources that we can live without, others we simply cannot. Petroleum products, for example, are extremely useful in providing an energy source, but we don't consume oil and gas internally; they are a useful convenience.
The growing and harvesting of grain products, on the other hand, are vital to human existence. Which is what makes it so gruesomely unintelligent to bypass a certain percentage of grains for human consumption, earmarking it for the purpose of ethanol production. Combining grain and corn extracts, for example, with petroleum products to make those products go further, while relinquishing the food value of the grains for the expediency of prolonging oil-products' life.
Canada happens to be generously endowed with great, flat prairies, perfect weather wise and atmospherically for the growth of wheat and other grains. And Canadian wheat is superior to the kinds grown elsewhere in the world. Our soft wheat refined into flour for baking pastries, and our famed hard wheat, gluten-rich products refined into wheat perfect for baking yeast-risen products like breads and rolls.
We also, as it happens, are endowed additionally with an abundance of natural petroleum resources as to represent one of the greatest volumes of natural gas and oil in the world. The extraction of shale-oil does complicate matters, making it more costly to extract and refine, and in terms of environmental impacts. But these two resources in particular make Canada a very richly natural-resource-endowed country indeed.
The most wealthy countries in the world, reliant on petroleum-export in the Middle East are increasingly facing difficulties in growing and obtaining sufficient wheat products for their populations' consumption. Saudi Arabia, which once used its precious aquifers in an ill-considered move to irrigate the desert to grow their own grain, no longer does so, needing to preserve its store of potable water for drinking.
The United States, heavily dependent on oil, producing lots of its own, and using Canada's oil production as its reliable source, responded to a Middle East oil embargo in the 1970s by maintaining deep salt caverns stocked with hundreds of millions of barrels of emergency oil. While Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and the UAE maintain massive grain silos with "strategic reserves" of grain.
Serial drought conditions in the Middle East have caused erratic crop failures, with related spikes in food prices. Which in turn has spurred popular unrest among their populations at the rising scarcity of food products along with rising acquisition costs. Which inevitably sparked a mass protest which led to the current and ongoing phenomenon of the "Arab Spring", now become a political movement.
Canada is now seeing the Canadian Wheat Board selling millions of tonnes of wheat to Middle East countries. Long accustomed to seeing Canadian wheat as a staple in North African countries like Algeria, Morocco and Egypt, Canadian wheat is now providing the lions' share of imported grain to a growing number of Middle East countries.
While Canada has rivals in the area like Russia and Ukraine whose own wheat production provides an alternate source for countries in the Middle East, they are not preferred, because of their "low protein content" as opposed to Canadian wheat. Try baking a good bread product for example, in Japan, or in the United States, and one soon realizes that the hard wheat content there lacks what it takes to produce that outstanding bread product.
Canadian wheat presents as the world's premium product with few equals. We've got bragging rights to that.
The growing and harvesting of grain products, on the other hand, are vital to human existence. Which is what makes it so gruesomely unintelligent to bypass a certain percentage of grains for human consumption, earmarking it for the purpose of ethanol production. Combining grain and corn extracts, for example, with petroleum products to make those products go further, while relinquishing the food value of the grains for the expediency of prolonging oil-products' life.
Canada happens to be generously endowed with great, flat prairies, perfect weather wise and atmospherically for the growth of wheat and other grains. And Canadian wheat is superior to the kinds grown elsewhere in the world. Our soft wheat refined into flour for baking pastries, and our famed hard wheat, gluten-rich products refined into wheat perfect for baking yeast-risen products like breads and rolls.
We also, as it happens, are endowed additionally with an abundance of natural petroleum resources as to represent one of the greatest volumes of natural gas and oil in the world. The extraction of shale-oil does complicate matters, making it more costly to extract and refine, and in terms of environmental impacts. But these two resources in particular make Canada a very richly natural-resource-endowed country indeed.
The most wealthy countries in the world, reliant on petroleum-export in the Middle East are increasingly facing difficulties in growing and obtaining sufficient wheat products for their populations' consumption. Saudi Arabia, which once used its precious aquifers in an ill-considered move to irrigate the desert to grow their own grain, no longer does so, needing to preserve its store of potable water for drinking.
The United States, heavily dependent on oil, producing lots of its own, and using Canada's oil production as its reliable source, responded to a Middle East oil embargo in the 1970s by maintaining deep salt caverns stocked with hundreds of millions of barrels of emergency oil. While Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and the UAE maintain massive grain silos with "strategic reserves" of grain.
Serial drought conditions in the Middle East have caused erratic crop failures, with related spikes in food prices. Which in turn has spurred popular unrest among their populations at the rising scarcity of food products along with rising acquisition costs. Which inevitably sparked a mass protest which led to the current and ongoing phenomenon of the "Arab Spring", now become a political movement.
Canada is now seeing the Canadian Wheat Board selling millions of tonnes of wheat to Middle East countries. Long accustomed to seeing Canadian wheat as a staple in North African countries like Algeria, Morocco and Egypt, Canadian wheat is now providing the lions' share of imported grain to a growing number of Middle East countries.
While Canada has rivals in the area like Russia and Ukraine whose own wheat production provides an alternate source for countries in the Middle East, they are not preferred, because of their "low protein content" as opposed to Canadian wheat. Try baking a good bread product for example, in Japan, or in the United States, and one soon realizes that the hard wheat content there lacks what it takes to produce that outstanding bread product.
Canadian wheat presents as the world's premium product with few equals. We've got bragging rights to that.
Labels: Agriculture, Canada, Economy, Environment
posted by Pieface | 7:42 PM
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