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.
Your screen name is fitting. It explains why you don’t understand that farmers are planting field corn instead of sweet corn, therby raising the price of sweet corn.
15M metric tons of corn consumed per year in India. Possibly most of this goes to the cows.
90M tons of rice, and 75M tons of wheat.
The only reason I knew they ate corn in India is I have a vegetarian cookbook with a bunch of corn-based recipes from India.
The consumption is actually less than I would have expected from the book.
Actually, I am strongly opposed to ethanol as a fuel, and much prefer the idea of algae based biodiesel. However, in the southwest, they have been adding up to 15% ethanol to the gasoline for years, as it supposedly reduces pollution.
It’s pretty simple math. If you have enough ethanol, you can save the gasoline you otherwise would have used.
Importantly, alcohol only has half the energy of gasoline. Biodiesel contains about 94-96% of the energy of petroleum diesel. Diesel engines are scalable from cars and trucks, to trains and boats, and diesel engine technology is proven.
But my big argument is that ethanol could help us conserve gasoline if OPEC oil was shut off. It might give us enough time to develop other petroleum sources.
This could keep our country moving during war.
India is a very big and diverse place. Punjabis, Bengalis and Tamils have a whole lot less in common than Maineiacs, Alabamans and Californicators. They don't even speak the same language, except that quite a few speak English (sort of).
Do you have statistics on how many acres of sweet corn have been replaced with field corn? Do you think that fuel and fertilizer costs have any bearing whatsoever on the price of sweet corn?
Since hindus don’t eat cows, I’d say it wold be very dumb of them to feed all that corn to cows.
We learned how to turn food into fuel. I suggest the A-rabs start learning how to turn fuel into food real quick.
Yes, prices for produce are increasing. Nitrogen fertilizer, necessary for corn production, has more than doubled in price and farm diesel hit $4/gal. in my area ... I know because I bought 1000 gallons yesterday. That is up from $2.35 last year. Not to mention the fuel necessary to transport and deliver the food. Expect more increases before there is any relief.
If your screen name is such an isnult, then change it.
You are so pleasant to deal with. Have a great evening!
Yes, he was at the head of this train wreck. But it would seem that he, like most politicians, would rather screw the entire world than admit they were wrong.
You forgot that all the farm land in Haiti sit idle.
Why is that? Did ‘food aid’ killoff the local farmers?
NAh, that couldn’t have anything to do woth the lack of food in Haiti, Africa, etc, etc.
Killing with kindness indeed.
Article is a bunch of lying crap. Murdock wouldn’t
know a tractor tire from a horses rump.There is no price support for corn. The lying 8 billion figure he has
posted came from same horses rump that he is.There is only
a tax credit given to BIG OIL for adding ethanol and
that was about 4 billion last year and about 4% of
all tax credits BIG OIL gets for depletion, etc.
Some info about corn and ethanol—
Ethanol production does not reduce the amount of food available for human consumption. Ethanol is produced from field corn which is primarily fed to livestock and is undigestible by humans in its raw form. The ethanol production process produces not only fuel but valuable livestock feed products.
Every 56-pound bushel of corn used in the dry mill ethanol process yields 18 pounds of distillers grains, a good source of energy and protein for livestock and poultry. Similarly, a bushel of corn in the wet mill ethanol process creates 13.5 pounds of corn gluten feed and 2.6 pounds of high-protein corn gluten meal, as well as corn oil used in food processing.
Importantly, ethanol production utilizes only the starch portion of the corn kernel, which is abundant and of low value. While the starch is converted to ethanol, the protein, vitamins, minerals and fiber are sold as high-value livestock feed (distillers grains). Protein, which is left intact by the ethanol process, is a highly valued product in world food and feed markets. Aside from preserving the protein, a considerable portion of the corn’s original digestible energy is also preserved in the distillers grains.
Distillers grains have an average protein content (28 to 30%) that is typically at least three times higher than that of corn, making it a valuable ingredient in livestock and poultry diets. In 2006/07, more than 12 million metric tons of distillers grains were produced by ethanol biorefineries and fed to livestock and poultry. It is estimated that distillers grains displaced more than 500 million bushels of corn from feed rations last year, allowing that corn to be used in other markets.
It also is important to remember the amount of field corn actually used for human food is just a small fraction of the total corn supply. For example, cereal accounted for just over one percent of total corn use in 2005.
The overwhelming majority of U.S. corn, including exported corn, feeds livestock—not humans. There is a popular misconception that corn is exported from the U.S. to feed those in malnourished countries, and thus ethanol use will diminish exports to these countries. The truth is the majority of corn exports are used to feed livestock in developed countries. Importantly, the U.S. ethanol industry is helping to satisfy foreign demand for high-protein, high-energy feedstuffs by exporting more than 1 million metric tons of distillers grains to countries around the world in 2005.
It is also often overlooked that prices for commodities like wheat and rice have risen higher than corn and that these are crops not used in ethanol production.What has
happened though is the amount of money speculaing
in farm commodity markets has increased 20 time in last
8 years, and a lot of the price increse in from rampant
no risk speculation. A speculator can buy an option
with a small percentage of his money risked, which
is allowing crazy prices. Congress could change that by
requiring more of the speculators money put into
an option, and that would instill some caution.
Same for oil speculating, of which the price of along
with other energy sources increasing is the main reason
food prices are up. Ed Hubel.
I don’t know about food aid killing off all the farmers, but Mugabe sure drove out all the successful farmers in Zimbabwe until now that nation is no longer a food exporter but a food importer. And all because of race.
I strongly love ethanol in my V8s....don’t have front
wheel drive junk. Burn a 10% mix, get an extra
mile per gal, because of cleaner burning, IE using
all the energy in the mix more efficiently.In 10 to
15 percent mixes the lower btu value is made up by
oxygen carriers like ethanol burning the whole
blend more efficiently. A gal gas has 140,000 BTUs and
10% blend with ethanol has about 135,000 BTUs....
If blend increases efficiency 6% like on my cars
you just gained in two ways..Miliage and less dollars
sent to deranged nutcakes for oil...Ed Hubel
Farmers are still planting the same sweet corn acres.
Middlemen are just using this controversy to
raise prices, and also the fact that out of season
sweetcorn is always high.
It is not late summer....
For the regular crop!!!
You would be right if you didn’t buy the lying
misiformation he puts out.
Pimental is a blathering liar.There is no crop
of anything in the US that is farmed with tractors,
and harvested by machinery that uses that much fuel
to produce. I have 2 neighbors each farming 800 acres,
using about 30-40,000 gal of diesel and 5,000 of gas
a year.And no ethanol plant uses oil for energy.
And there is no corn support subsidies for farms.
There is gov requirement to add oxygenators to gas
to get cleaner burning and clear up the air,
which it has done.
And the ethanol isn’t trucked to outlets it is taken to
refiners to be blended in gas. Ed Hubel.
Nice list but I don’t see anything in it about the subject at hand and Bush has clearly led the effort to increase production of ethanol. Mostly as a giveaway to already susidized farmers but also as a sop to the environmentalists. Instead of taking a principled stand he folded. Plain and simple.
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