the citizen-viewer

Citizen-Viewer, whoever that is, kindly asked me to join his blog for occasional posts from my perspective as an academic with an interest in history and the environment. I spent years researching animal husbandry in the early nineteenth-century United States, the results of which are in my book, The Razorback Frontier: Hog and Human in Antebellum Arkansas (Jonesboro: Arkansas State University Press, 2005).

With that introduction out of the way I wanted to post about the biofuels scam that’s endangering the world’s food supply. The Guardian got a hold of an unpublished World Bank report that found that the diversion of food into fuel accounts for 75% of the recent rise in world food prices. This rise in prices has exacerbated food shortages throughout the developing world and has added to the inflationary trend here in the U.S.

Here’s a nugget from the report:
“Rising food prices have pushed 100m people worldwide below the poverty line, estimates the World Bank, and have sparked riots from Bangladesh to Egypt. Government ministers here have described higher food and fuel prices as “the first real economic crisis of globalisation”.

With the shield of green energy covering their tracks the corn lobby has pulled off a corporate welfare deal that’s even bigger than the New Deal era crop set-aside program or the 1830s British Corn Laws, which also sparked rioting. American corn growers have been guaranteed a market by the feds. The 2005 Energy Policy Act (thank you, last Republican Congress) requires that 6.1 billion gallons of ethanol be mixed with gasoline sold within the U.S. by next year, and ups the total to 7.5 billion gallons by 2012. It’s no wonder that corn baron Archer Daniels Midland Co. funds the Sunday talk shows and PBS public affairs programming. They need good PR.

As with prior subsidies to big farming, biofuels masquerades as a public interest measure when in fact the public benefit is minimal. Corn is an extremely inefficient source of energy in that under the best conditions corn yields about 1.3 units of gasoline for every 1 unit of fossil fuel energy required to grow the corn in the first place. Add to that number the fact that ethanol generates 34% less energy per gallon than fossil-fuel gas and you’re basically taking about a wash. Brazil has done better in the fuel to biofuel yield with sugarcane at 8 units of ethanol for every one unit of fossil fuel, but the side effects include a speedup in deforesting the Amazon.

To put this in perspective, currently one third of all U.S. corn is turned into ethanol. The figure is set to rise to one half if even some of Bush’s plan to quintuple biofuel output by 2017 is enacted. Combine that with America’s status as the leading corn exporter and you’ve got a built-in supply/demand problem. Since the U.S. produces one half of the world’s corn production this is guaranteed to make corn cost more and have a ripple effect on grains like wheat and rice which are used as substitutes for corn.

While global warming sucks, consider that 18 bushels of corn goes into every gallon of gasoline and you can see that biofuels are not the answer. Instead biofuels attack one problem, higher fuel prices and a hotter climate, with another, starvation of the world’s poor. Of course, there’s gold and power in those crop subsidies and as The Guardian indicates this World Bank report was buried in order to spare Bush and the G8 embarrassment.

In this light, the push for biofuels reminds me of what a friend said when asked to describe a particularly difficult job interview (one he lost): “It was like grabbing the corn with no hands.”

— Dwight “Sausage” McGraw