Why does the World Trade Organisation allow a rich country like Canada to get away with cartelising a commodity like potash, which influences the price of food also needed by people far less well-heeled than First World Canadians? Surely competition should be mandatory when it comes to ingredients for soil enrichment and basic human nutrition? Instead, Canada gets away with CanPotex, a single-channel potash marketing conduit. Pictured here is a railway line being built to transport Canadian potash to port from a potash mine project site near Bethune, in Saskatchewan. The $4.1-billion solution potash mine being built from scratch is expected to be at full two-million-tonne-a-year commercial production by late 2017. Solution mining involves pumping heated water through the orebody to dissolve the potash and pumping the resultant brine solution to a refinery for extraction.