Canadian Canola Production - a Riches-to-Rags Tale?

Manitoba Co-Operator - Commodity News Service Canada
A healthy canola field. PLT photo
 Canadian canola exports during the 2012-13 crop year were expected to come in at a record-high level -- but smaller-than-anticipated production is now predicted to dim those prospects. Full story here.

PLT: Crop production stories, chalk-full of numbers such as this one, are both important and interesting, I'm sure. But, as a consumer with an environmental conscience, I am frequently disappointed at the lack of context in such stories in the overall scheme of things. For example, in my own rural area, coffee-talk is rife with reports of a rare canola disease this year which, I am told, is a fungus spread by an insect which thrives in warm weather. That bug was apparently carried from the south where record heat and drought enabled it to thrive. I THINK the disease is called Aster Yellows (Phytoplasma) (l).  It was, this year, worse than it has ever been and shattered the hopes many farmers had harboured earlier in the season, for bumper crops. (At least one farmer told me he believes it cut his expected yields by almost one-half.) Yet little of this seems to reach the public airwaves.

So just when are the media going to begin telling you, the farmer, the truth about what climate change is doing to you and the world's food supply, and how you, with your ever-larger, fuel-guzzling, greenhouse-gas-producing machines, may be contributing to it, yourself?

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