Food or fuel?
As
global starvation worsens, the U.S. plans to devote vast amounts of
grain to producing ethanol.
A
Los Angeles Times editorial which appeared February 26,
2008.
Something
is very wrong with this picture: The United Nations’ World Food
Program has been hit so hard by skyrocketing grain prices that it may
be forced to cut off some food aid to the world’s poorest countries,
while the United States is planning to turn record quantities of corn
into automotive fuel.
The astonishing callousness of burning
millions of bushels of grain in gas tanks even as global starvation
worsens has apparently never occurred to Congress, the Bush
administration or the remaining presidential candidates, all of whom
are big boosters of ethanol. The mania for passing ever-bigger
mandates on biofuels reached such a pitch last year that the 2007
energy bill called
for a whopping 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2022. In
order to ratchet up to that level, the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency recently
ordered that
9 billion gallons be blended with gasoline this year. Most of that
will be ethanol made from corn; last year, the U.S. produced billion
gallons 5.8
of
the stuff.
Cereal grain import prices for the world’s poorest
countries are expected to rise 35% for the second consecutive year in
2008, according to the U.N.
Food and Agriculture Organization. Droughts
and floods have reduced grain stocks, and demand is rising in part
because better living standards in developing countries are bringing
a change in diet — Indians and Chinese are eating more meat, so more
grain is needed for livestock feed. And ethanol is making a bad
situation worse. The U.S. is the world’s top corn exporter, and about
a quarter of last year’s crop went to ethanol. Food prices,
meanwhile, have increased so much that the World Food Program says it
will have to raise $500 million more just to carry out its scheduled
operations.
It needn’t come down to a choice between
conserving oil or feeding the poor. The U.N. has developed a tool
for
assessing the impacts of biofuel production on food security,
something Congress never bothered to study before passing its
extravagant mandate. Until the environmental and economic effects of
biofuels have been thoroughly examined, the government should stop
trying to squeeze more energy out of corn cobs. Meanwhile, the U.S.
is obliged to contribute more to world food aid in order to undo some
of the damage it has wrought.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-food26feb26,0,3838970.story
