Steven Mufson has a devastating piece in the Washington Post on how attempts to harvest corn-based ethanol are contributing to the world food crisis.
One quarter of U.S. corn production is now going into ethanol. At the same time farmers are shifting from other crops to grow corn so that percentage means more than it would have years ago. And for what? According to a recent study in Science magazine ethanol produces more CO2 than gasoline does. This isn’t a new idea, corn-based ethanol has always been a boondoggle. Without subsidizes this wouldn’t be happening because the process is unprofitable. Many defenders point out that corn grown for ethanol isn’t usable for food for humans, true enough, but the land could be used to crow crops that are edible.
For a long time, this sort of policy wasn’t worth that much political capital. Everyone knew it was a problem, but the U.S. system is heavily biased towards farm state Senators so fixing it was often thought to be more trouble than its worth. Ezra Klein cites a NY Times article by Andrew Martin where the International Food Policy Research Institute attributed a quarter to a third of the spike in commodity prices to biolfuels. The Food and Agriculture Organization at the UN predicted "predicted late last year that biofuel production, assuming that current mandates continue, would increase food costs by 10 to 15 percent."
Well now we’ve got a silent tsunami (via PCR) on our hands. The world food crisis could push 100 million people into absolute poverty.
No food for oil.
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