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Canada is a net exporter of food and agricultural products, which last year hit a record high of $34.6 billion.

It's the world's second largest exporter of wheat, after the United States, and has surpluses in wheat, meat and dairy that far outweigh our deficits in fruits, vegetables and coffee, and other crops not easily grown in a colder climate.

Farm cash receipts rose to a record $40.5 billion last year on higher grain prices.

Overall, more than 70 per cent of what Canadians eat is produced at home, including most meat and dairy products, partly due to supply management practices that limit import competition for poultry, dairy and eggs.

Bread and cereal products are also largely supplied by Canadian farmers and food processors.

Food price inflation in Canada has risen only 1.2 per cent in the past year, compared to 5.9 per cent in the United States and 7.1 per cent in the European Union.

Countries in Asia with rice-based diets are experiencing the fastest increase in food costs as the price of rice doubled early this year. In China, food prices are up 22 per cent, largely due to blue ear disease in the swine population.

an unexpected discovery. It was first made in 1962 by the Nobel economist Amartya Sen, and has since been confirmed by dozens of studies. There is an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they produce per hectare. The smaller they are, the greater the yield.

In some cases, the difference is enormous. A recent study of farming in Turkey, for example, found that farms of less than one hectare are 20 times as productive as farms of more than 10 hectares. Sen's observation has been tested in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Malaysia, Thailand, Java, the Philippines, Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay. It appears to hold almost everywhere.

The finding would be surprising in any industry, as we have come to associate efficiency with scale. In farming it seems particularly odd, because small producers are less likely to own machinery, less likely to have capital or access to credit, and less likely to know about the latest techniques.

Over the last 50 years, North Americans and some Europeans have got used to food costing something like 10 to 15 per cent of their earnings. If reports from ING Group consultants are right, price hikes of 40 per cent are expected to be the new normal.

This trend doesn’t seem like good news for the poor, until we remember that about 2 billion of the world’s poorest people are farmers about to see their first days free of cutthroat competition since the formation of the World Trade Organization in 1992.

If prices respond to supply-and-demand pressures, there will also be a long-awaited reordering of social service priorities. Governments will at last have to respond to the needs of the urban poor by providing more affordable housing and higher minimum wages and social allowances. It’s time cheap food stopped substituting for rational social policy.

Diets will get healthier when the farm sector no longer needs to find ways of getting rid of crops in wasteful, negative ways like turning potatoes into potato chips, wheat into donuts or corn into factory-barn meat larded with fat and antibiotics. Living off the fat of the land is risking the lives of a billion overweight people.

Also on the demand side, ethanol from corn is using up a sixth of the 2007 U.S. crop, creating some scarcity and raising prices. When corn prices jump, the impact leapfrogs through the food chain, from beef (15 pounds for one pound of meat) to sweeteners.

Whether it’s for corn ethanol or a better crop, fewer acres for food and more for fuel and fiber are an inevitability of peak oil times, and that means prices are heading north.

Then come new pressures on the “supply side.” A third of the world’s fisheries are depleted. Drought is more common.

Australia, usually the world’s third-largest wheat exporter and a major supplier of China and South America, has been sidelined by drought.

China’s annual shortfall in wheat production, due to soil erosion and lack of irrigation water from dried-up aquifers, equals the entire Canadian harvest, according to a report in Asia Pacific Food Technology.

chief scientific adviser.

In his first major speech since taking over, Professor John Beddington said the global rush to grow biofuels was compounding the problem, and cutting down rainforest to produce biofuel crops was "profoundly stupid".