Posted on 04/18/2008 3:51:36 PM PDT by PROCON
To paraphrase the late, great William F. Buckley, Jr., someone must stand athwart the federal ethanol program yelling, “Stop!” The emergency brake should be pulled -- NOW -- before ethanol wreaks further havoc.
Poor Haitians rioted last week outside Port-au-Prince’s presidential palace, forcing Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis’ April 12 ouster. Haitians are enduring food prices 40 percent higher than last summer’s. Some have resorted to eating cookies made of salt, vegetable oil, and dirt. That’s right: Dirt cookies.
Developing-world denizens are taking it to the streets with growling stomachs. In Bob Marley’s words, “A hungry man is an angry man.”
Climbing corn prices have ignited Mexican tortilla riots. Enraged citizens in Egypt and Pakistan -- potential Muslim powder kegs -- also violently have protested premium prices for basic staples. Similar instability has erupted from the Ivory Coast to Indonesia. Resurrecting the defeated “import substitution” model of yore, India and Vietnam are among the nations that lately have prohibited grain exports and imposed government price controls. Kazakhstan, Earth’s No. 5 wheat source, just halted wheat exports, hoping to horde local supplies. One third of the global wheat market is now closed.
High oil prices and growing global food demand fan these flames, but government lit the match. Atop the European Union’s biofuels mandate, America’s 51-cent-per-gallon ethanol tax subsidy (2007 cost: $8 billion) and Congress’ 7.5-billion-gallon annual production quota (rising to 36 billion in 2022) have turned corn farms into monetary printing presses. Diverting one quarter of U.S. corn into motors rather than mouths has boosted prices 74 percent in a year.
Eager to ride the ethanol gravy train, wheat and soybean farmers increasingly switch to corn. Thus, hard wheat is up 86 percent, while soybeans cost 93 percent more. Since April 15, 2007, pricier, grain-based animal feed has helped hike eggs 46 percent. Got milk? You paid 26 percent more. Conversely, meat prices have dropped, as farmers slaughter animals rather than pay so much to feed them.
All this has triggered a race to the top of the grain silo.
On April 9, “the World Bank estimated global food prices have risen 83 percent over the past three years, threatening recent strides in poverty reduction,” the Wall Street Journal noted the next day. “The price of rice, the staple for billions of Asians, is up 147 percent over the past year.”
As ReasonOnline’s Ronald Bailey observed April 8, “the result of these mandates is that about 100 million tons of grain will be transformed this year into fuel…100 million tons of grain is enough to feed nearly 450 million people for a year.” In short, car engines are burning the crops that feed a half-billion people.
President Bush announced on Monday that the United States would provide $200 million in nutritional aid to poor countries ripped by such unrest. This may feed starving rioters, but it perversely requires that Uncle Sam allocate fresh taxpayer money to scour the mess he created by spending $8 billion in ethanol subsidies.
This is like buying a new hangover cure every morning after closing a new bar every night.
Bad enough if this suffering and strife were ethanol’s ransom for dramatic environmental progress. In fact, ethanol is Earth-hostile. Turning forests into corn fields kills wildlife-friendly, CO2-absorbent trees. Nitrogen-based fertilizers yield nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas. Irrigating corn strains fresh-water supplies and fills streams with agricultural chemicals.
Enough!
Congress immediately should abolish federal ethanol subsidies, mandates, and the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on imports -- including Brazil’s cheaper, cleaner, sugar-based ethanol. If scientists can develop ethanol that neither starves people nor rapes the Earth, splendid. However, this enterprise must not rest upon morally repugnant, ecologically counterproductive, economically devastating, government-ordered distortions.
This is all a sop to U.S. grain growers, arguably the most pampered and endlessly entitled people beside Saudi royalty. Since they are hooked on handouts, here’s one more: In exchange for a two-year federal tax holiday on any income they earn, every actual, tractor-driving corn/biofuel farmer should retreat quietly and let America’s experiment in state-sponsored ethanol enter the Unintended Consequences Hall of Fame. Compared to the global chaos that ethanol is fueling, this is a tolerable, one-time investment to pry these farmers’ and their Washington enablers’ hands off of our necks.
I read somewhere that ethanol production might actually use more energy than it produces. If so, this is all a PC shell game anyway.
I suspect something about the whole ethanol deal, and why George W. Bush suddenly endorsed it a while back. Remember that Bush is an oil man, and has a real good grasp of the reality of ethanol and energy.
What if there was a sudden cut off of OPEC oil, right now?
Despite the high price of crude, President Bush has been buying oil right, left and sideways to put in the strategic reserve. Right now, there is enough crude there for a 60 day supply.
Since we can’t count on Venezuelan oil anymore, in that Chavez would probably join an OPEC shut off, how much new oil production could be started in the US and Canada in 60 days? Maybe not enough.
But interestingly, by adding ethanol to gasoline, up to 15% less gasoline is consumed, without affecting gasoline engine performance. While certainly not enough to replace all of our gasoline, it gives the US and Canada more time to pump and refine oil.
The answer to the supposed brainlessness of ethanol production might have been answered in the last week, when a group of congressional Democrats asked Bush to stop putting more crude oil in the strategic reserve “...which would enable the United States to go to war with Iran.”
Other than having utter disgust for these Democrats, it might answer the question of why the price of food is going up right now. Food used to produce alcohol.
Despite their insistence to the contrary, George W. Bush is no fool. And if we do get into a war with Iran, we will kick their butt, despite the passionate desire of the Democrats that we lose and be both humiliated and defeated.
Sweet corn is sold in the grocery store. Not the same as field corn used for ethanol.
AMEN! Thank you!
Somehow cheap food has become a constitutional and human right. Also, the most hated country in the world is responsible for everyone's well-being. It is truly a bizarro world.
Was there any mention at all of crop failures around the world and ever-growing populations in relation to tighter food supplies?
SAY WHAT???
Are you a farmer or have relatives who are benefiting from the biggest BONDOGGLE I've seen in my 64 years.?
http://www.igreens.org.uk/ethanol_from_corn_.htm
The real problem with ethanol from corn is that it requires fuel to make the corn. David Pimentel a professor from Cornell has done the analysis [i]. An acre of U.S. corn can be processed into about 328 gallons of ethanol. But planting, growing and harvesting that much corn requires about 140 gallons of fossil fuels and costs $347 per acre, according to Pimentel. That is $1.05 per gallon of ethanol before the corn even moves off the farm.
The energy economics get worse at the processing plants, where the grain is crushed and fermented. As many as three distillation steps and other treatments are needed to separate the ethanol from the water. All these need energy.
Adding up the energy costs of corn production and its conversion to ethanol, 131,000 BTUs are needed to make 1 gallon of ethanol which has an energy value of only 77,000 BTU. "Put another way," Pimentel says, "about 70 percent more energy is required to produce ethanol than the energy that actually is in ethanol. Every time you make 1 gallon of ethanol, there is a net energy loss of 54,000 BTU."
Overall ethanol from corn costs about $1.74 per gallon to produce, compared with about 95 cents to produce a gallon of petrol. "That helps explain why fossil fuels -- not ethanol -- are used to produce ethanol" Pimentel says. "The growers and processors can't afford to burn ethanol to make ethanol. Drivers couldn't afford it, either, if it weren't for government subsidies to artificially lower the price."
Everything that I have read, indicates that Ethanol is much less efficient as gasoline and we have not even touched on the fact that it has to be trucked to all outlets.
Sorry, I just don't buy it, although, I am forced to do so, against my will and better judgment.
This is so much bull pucky!
There is a shortage of rice and beans in Haiti. When supplies get there the folks can’t afford to buy the food, so they riot. What are we supposed to do? Take over the island and nation-build Haiti for the umpteenth time! Enough is enough.
There was a failure of the wheat crop in Ukraine. A drought has destoyed the rice harvest in Australia, and thus Asian nations are not exporting rice, period.
So - what has that got to do with how we handle our corn harvest, much less allocate the crop? It is not the business of Mexico or India to tell us what to do - they can all starve (I am hard hearted) because their stupid, backward socialist run governments can’t feed those nations.
And since when have the south Asian Indians eaten corn? They grow and eat rice.
Oh, before I forget: the crop of corn for this year is predicted to be 20% larger than last year’s, and the crop for next year is being predicted (by commodities traders) to be half-again as large as this years. Free markets responding to increased demand - it’s a beautiful thing!
Thanks to W. He was the one who came up with the terrible phrase that Americans are addicted to oil.
Hurrah! I finally see someone other than me saying just that.........Let 'em starve.
The small amount of corn used to produce ethanol in this country will not save the world’s population from starving. Most of those folks eat rice and beans, not corn. It is because of crop failures in other countries that people are going hungry.
It isn’t our fault. And the idea that Asia will just be fat, dumb and happy eating the tiny bit of corn we’re turning into ehtanol is nonsense!
I was saying this long ago. Since when is hungry people in third world countries going to dictated american energy policy? If ethanol is a bad idea, it should be halted INDEPENDENT of world opinion. It should be halted by our own economic analysis...NOTHING MORE!
The amounts of corn diverted to biofuels are responsible for a minor part of the rise in food prices. Even 1/4 of the US corn crop is a very small amount of the world’s total grain crop.
The big issue is that hundreds of millions of people in Asia have recently climbed out of poverty and for the first time are able to eat something besides grain. Producing a pound of meat takes anywhere from 5 to 10 pounds of grain.
I thought it was a good thing when people are no longer absolutely poor.
BTW, a great deal of corn is eaten in India, especially in the North.
<...If ethanol is a bad idea,...it should be halted by our own economic analysis...>
Agreed.
At anytime in the past few years W could have called for coordinated intervention to strengthen the dollar and that would have arrested skyrocketing oil prices. But he’s not going to do that. He’s tried ignorantly to turn our country into a commodity based economy, with ever higher prices, and a weaker dollar has been a big part of that.
The price in the grocery store has risen as well—not saying I know why, but it has.
I've got news for the author. Haitians eat dirt cookies whether other food is in supply or not.
<...a great deal of corn is eaten in India, especially in the North.
I didn’t know that, and am very surprised. None of my Indian freinds have ever said anything about that, except that they feed corn to their cattle. Do you know, have there been widespread crop failures in India too, just like in Australia?
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