This came over the Sierra Club Agriculture Listserv – good summary, I think.
Donna
Corn as fuel has hurt world food supply
Newsday
by Andy Kimbrell, founder and executive director of the nonprofit
Center for Food Safety.
June 20, 2008
edited
According to this op ed, rising food prices are a hardship here at
home, but they're truly disastrous for many beyond our borders. The
staggering 83 percent rise in food prices reported by the World Bank
over the past three years hits developing nations hardest. It's a
complex situation with many causes, but the crisis is teaching us
important and urgent lessons.
First among these is what we've learned about biofuels. Once
considered the "green" solution to foreign oil dependence, corn
ethanol has morphed into a humanitarian and environmental disaster.
Diverting one-quarter of America's massive corn harvest from food to
fuel has nearly crippled the globalized food system. A bushel of corn
fetches about three times the price it did two years ago, one big
reason for quadrupling tortilla prices in Mexico. Wheat and soybean
farmers, lured by higher profits, switched over to corn. As a result,
supplies of those crops are limited and wheat prices have risen an
astronomical 130 percent since 2007, exacerbated by poor Australian
harvests.
If you thought corn ethanol was at least lessening our dependence on
foreign oil, think again: Ethanol displaces only 3 percent of our oil
use. Additionally, the journal "Science" recently published research
suggesting that biofuels are worsening global warming as well as
hunger. High demand for energy crops is driving deforestation, which
in turn releases huge amounts of greenhouse gases that far exceed
minor reductions provided by the energy crops themselves.
Even those who embraced biofuels so enthusiastically a year ago are
beginning to see what a chimera they actually are. Until alternative
technologies are embraced, crop-based biofuels will continue to
deprive the hungry of desperately needed food.
The second lesson: our industrialized approach to agriculture
essentially transforms fossil fuels into human food. Food production
American style consumes mountains of fossil-fuel-based fertilizers,
over half-a-billion pounds of petroleum-based pesticides, and millions
of gallons of fuel to drive farm equipment each year. Processing food
and getting it to market consumes still more. The cost of a pound of
beef, a gallon of milk or a box of cereal climbs ever higher,
entangled with the skyrocketing price of oil.
A third lesson is that biotechnology can provide no solution. Biotech
firms are pushing the idea that genetically engineered, or GE, crops
will feed the world. But two decades of costly research has not
produced a single marketable GE crop with increased yield,
drought-resistance, enhanced nutrition or other attractive traits
touted by boosters. What has succeeded are "herbicide-tolerant" GE
varieties - engineered to survive application of weed killers - which
remarkably make up 81 percent of the world's biotech crops. Small
wonder that weed killer use is rising, and resistant weeds are
proliferating.
To top it off, university studies show that Roundup Ready soybeans -
which make up more than half of all biotech crops - get 6 percent
lower yield than their conventional counterparts and are more
susceptible to drought.
Despite these failures, government and biotechnology firms continue to
tout genetic engineering as a magic bullet. Meanwhile, hundreds of
conventional breeding and agroecological solutions remain
unimplemented, thanks to draconian cuts to public sector agricultural
development programs.
Through the lens of this crisis, we also see the sense in buying
abundant, locally grown foods. Since they travel less and now cost
less than processed food or produce flown from across the globe, local
crops are looking more and more attractive. They're also fresher, more
healthful and more beneficial to consumers. And, in buying them, we
support local farmers.
The food crisis is conjoined to the fuel crisis, and this has opened
our eyes to the flaws in our food production and distribution
practices. It has also, thankfully, pointed us in the direction of
real solutions - if we as consumers, policymakers and businesspeople
are bold enough to make the needed changes.
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