Guardian: The Looming Food Crisis

[GliderGuider]

Some excerpted paragraphs:

The looming food crisis

The era of "agrofuels" has arrived, and the scale of the changes it is already forcing on farming and markets around the world is immense. In Nebraska alone, an extra million acres of maize have been planted this year, and the state boasts it will produce 1bn gallons of ethanol. Across the US, 20% of the whole maize crop went to ethanol last year. How much is that? Just 2% of US automobile use

But the surge in demand for agrofuels such as ethanol is hitting the poor and the environment the hardest. The UN World Food Programme, which feeds about 90m people mostly with US maize, reckons that 850m people around the world are already undernourished. There will soon be more because the price of food aid has increased 20% in just a year. Meanwhile, Indian food prices have risen 11% in a year, the price of the staple tortilla quadrupled in Mexico in February and crowds of 75,000 people came on to the streets in protest. South Africa has seen food-price rises of nearly 17%, and China was forced to halt all new planting of corn for ethanol after staple foods such as pork soared by 42% last year.

A "perfect storm" of ecological and social factors appears to be gathering force, threatening vast numbers of people with food shortages and price rises. Even as the world's big farmers are pulling out of producing food for people and animals, the global population is rising by 87 million people a year; developing countries such as China and India are switching to meat-based diets that need more land; and climate change is starting to hit food producers hard. Recent reports in the journals Science and Nature suggest that one-third of ocean fisheries are in collapse, two-thirds will be in collapse by 2025, and all major ocean fisheries may be virtually gone by 2048. "Global grain supplies will drop to their lowest levels on record this year. Outside of wartime, they have not been this low in a century, perhaps longer," says the US Department of Agriculture.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that rain-dependent agriculture could be cut in half by 2020 as a result of climate change. "Anything even close to a 50% reduction in yields would obviously pose huge problems," said Sheeran.

Back on the great plains, meanwhile, ethanol fever is running high. This time last year, there were fewer than 100 ethanol plants in the whole United States, with a combined production capacity of 5bn gallons. There are now at least 50 more new plants being built and over 300 more are planned. If even half of them are finished, they will help to rewrite the politics of global food.

There's more in the article, and it's all just as depressing.

But hey, if it results in the USA buying just one less barrel of oil from a Middle Eastern sheik then it's all worth it. Right? Right???

!Estamos tan jodidos!

[AdHocSolver]

1. The joke is that using ethanol does NOT reduce oil imports at all.

This is why the oil companies are happy to use it. Ethanol was originally added to gas (back in the 1990's), because it was claimed that it would reduce smog. However, I never believed that this could be the case since, whenever I filled my car's gas tank with ethanol-laced gas, I noticed a drop in gas mileage of at least three miles per gallon. (I always fill the tank when the gauge shows about a half tank, and compute the MPG.) So logic told me that, even if ethanol reduced smog a little bit, the total smog produced would be the same or greater, since the car burned more gas.

Recently I made a 400 mile car trip and happened to fill the tank, going and coming, at the same gas station that said "100% gasoline", i.e., no ethanol. I saw a MPG improvement of about 4 MPG. This was no mistake as the car showed the same improvement both going and returning. My compact car has a 13 gallon tank, 12 gallons useable. It averages about 30+ miles per gallon. Rough calculations indicate that I could get as much as 48 more miles per tank of gas without ethanol in the gas. That means with ethanol, my car uses ten percent more gas per tankful. Funny, but the gas stations all say that they add 10 percent ethanol to the gas. Therefore, assuming other cars experience the same loss in mileage, we are not saving any gasoline at all by burning ethanol.

When you consider that by turning a staple food crop like corn into ethamol which we are burning up in our gas guzzlers, the oil companies are reducing the supply of corn and therefore driving up its price. This is why the price of dairy products is rising noticeably (a gallon of milk up 60 cents in the last two months in the store where I buy milk). Since corn is used to feed livestock (cows, pigs, chickens), and used in baked goods, soft drinks, and candy (corn syrup), we can look forward to food prices rising across the board.

Of course, this need not be a total disaster, as our food producers can always buy cheaper grain from places like China, and hope our government will find and confiscate any such imported grain that might contain toxins like melamine. (Oh, maybe the next government.)