Increasing Use of Biofuels May Lead to More World Hunger
New biofuels designed to use plants to keep the U.S. and the rest of the world in their auto-dependent lifestyles is increasing the cost of food, an increasing issue for poor countries:
Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, has called for a five-year moratorium on the production of biofuels, saying that converting crops such as maize, wheat and sugar into fuels was driving up the prices of food, land and water.
Noting that the price of wheat has doubled in one year, Mr. Ziegler warned that if the prices of food crops continued to rise, the poorest countries will not be able to import enough food for their people.
While such fuels do offer some promise for the future it is clear to many that we simply cannot continue to drive the miles that the average American does. We already contribute more per capita to the warming of the planet, the last thing we need to do is increase the hunger in poor nations by burning ethanol in a “flex fuel” Chevy Suburban SUV. A reduction of total miles driven is the only real sustainable solution. It doesn’t mean everyone needs to stop driving altogether — simply work to reduce total miles by carpooling, combining errands, shop at the closer store, and use other modes of transportation. More on the food issue via Green Car Congress.
My understanding is that it is directly responsible for the significant increase in the price of meat and dairy products. If so, it’s a lousy deal already. I agree, reducing total miles is the only real solution. Unfortunately, as we build longer, wider highways everywhere, that seems unlikely.
A recent survey by the Wall Street Journal concludes that going green, for most Americans, “pretty much any price is too high”. Claims of good intentions are often trumped by monetary considerations. Also, the desire to fuel our cars-trucks-buses and avoid physical activity has led to an infrastructure that compounds the problems instead of addressing the addictions. Only 42% (45% one year earlier) of respondents believe that the federal government should require by law that cars be built to use less gas.
We have a grand opportunity in the StL region to correct our infrastructure and to create green incentives at low costs. However, local leadership also fails in these areas as our roads-highways are being rapidly expanded and rebuilt to support more sprawl and to put larger and more dangerous trucks in our main artery. The efforts of the Senior Planner of the Bike-Pedestrian program for MoDOT has been marginalized for years and rumors has it that she was fired last month. Too vocal against the New I64 and other state plans perhaps?
We now even have federal tax subsidies that incentivizes farmers to grow crops to feed cars instead of people. This policy will be very costly in terms of food and dairy items, land, water, etc. Even the conservative Cato Institue has writtten a number of papers against such self-destructive policies and they can be found here: http://find.cato.org/search?q=ethanol&btnG=Go&site=cato_all&client=cato_all&restrict=Cato&filter=p&lr=lang_en&output=xml_no_dtd&proxystylesheet=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cato.org%2Ft
I agree, as well. One, different, solution that merits further research marries the emerging work of “plug-in” hybrids with solar panels. If a company (or someone) could figure out how to use solar panels to recharge the batteries in a commuter’s hybrid vehicle while it’s parked the 8-10 hours a day it is in the typical suburban surface parking lot, it would go a long to solving the energy problem (but would do nothing for the underlying sprawl, congestion and poor-urban-design issues).
A big part of the problem driving our huge appetite fuels (of all types) is the misguided belief that bigger is always better. The bigger vehicle and bigger home and the longer commute all use more fuel than the lighter, smaller, shorter options. The government has the power to incentivize these options (in the short term) until they can become self-supporting/cost-competitive (in the long term). Unfortunately, the current incentives have created an unsustainable dynamic for the production of corn-based ethanol – it takes more energy to produce the energy contained in the final product, yet the tax incentives have convinced many investors that there will be a long-term and growing market for it. We need to either find another source crop (switchgrass?) and/or locate the distilleries where heat is currently being “wasted” – cooling towers at coal-fired power plants, geothermal springs, (potentially) solar collectors, brick kilns, etc. Energy independence won’t come from one, simple, quick fix, it will come from a sustained effort to improve every step in the process!
I’ve always read that there is actually a huge SURPLUS of food production in the world, for quite some time now. The issue is not lack of food – but rather DISTRIBUTION of the food. Thus, millions starve in Africa while tons of grain rot in the silos of North America. The problems of robbing the breadbox to fuel the ego-box would of course be dramatically decreased if there were more diesels and production of *bio-diesel* fuel (which nets nearly double the MPG’s of fossil fuels), instead of ethanol fuels which actually results in fewer MPG’s than conventional fossil fuels. Keeping long-distance frieght off the highways and back onto railways would help tremendously as well.
Using ethanol for vehicles isn’t going to work. Stick to the pulling the stuff from underground. How many miles people drive or gallons they need is another story.
While I agree that reducing our consumption of fuels is a good idea, I don’t agree that it is the whole solution. Fact is that many of these countries are overpopulated and simply do not have the infrastructure or agriculture to support their population. Do we really want to increase the amount of food we export to feed these countries? Isn’t that counter-productive to our goal of reducing fuel consumption? Corn doesn’t fly itself halfway around the world – it requires a lot of fuel to move that food.
We need policies in place within the US to reduce our dependency on fuels. As far as world hunger is concerned, we should focus on increasing the output of local food to the countries in need and having policies put in place to curb overpopulation in those countries.
“Using food to run automobiles is the dumbest idea I have ever heard.” – Charles T. Munger, May 2007
maize?
where was this report filed? In the Cherokee nation?
Joking aside- No shit, flex fuel is the retarded baby of the agriculture lobby.
The same lobby that gets farmers paid for fallow fields.
awesome stuff!
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Perhaps if we stopped paying people farm subsidies for suburban sprawl and for farmers not to farm land we could set a fair, lower market price of commodities.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/01/AR2006070100962.html
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/energy/article/0,2777,DRMN_23914_5734695,00.html