This came over the Sierra Club Agriculture
Listserv – good summary, I think.
Donna
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From:
Sent: Monday, June 23, 2008 3:26 AM
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Subject: Corn as fuel has hurt world food supply
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
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
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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