Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 04/14/2008 7:52:26 PM PDT by DeaconBenjamin
We drive, they starve. The mass diversion of the North American grain harvest into ethanol plants for fuel is reaching its political and moral limits.
A demonstrator eats grass in front of a U.N. peacekeeping soldier during a protest against the high cost of living in Port-au-Prince
"The reality is that people are dying already," said Jacques Diouf, of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). "Naturally people won't be sitting dying of starvation, they will react," he said.
The UN says it takes 232kg of corn to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol. That is enough to feed a child for a year. Last week, the UN predicted "massacres" unless the biofuel policy is halted.
We are all part of this drama whether we fill up with petrol or ethanol. The substitution effect across global markets makes the two morally identical.
Mr Diouf says world grain stocks have fallen to a quarter-century low of 5m tonnes, rations for eight to 12 weeks. America - the world's food superpower - will divert 18pc of its grain output for ethanol this year, chiefly to break dependency on oil imports. It has a 45pc biofuel target for corn by 2015.
Argentina, Canada, and Eastern Europe are joining the race.
The EU has targeted a 5.75pc biofuel share by 2010, though that may change. Europe's farm ministers are to debate a measure this week ensuring "absolute priority" for food output.
"The world food situation is very serious: we have seen riots in Egypt, Cameroon, Haiti and Burkina Faso," said Mr Diouf. "There is a risk that this unrest will spread in countries where 50pc to 60pc of income goes to food," he said.
Haiti's government fell over the weekend following rice and bean riots. Five died.
The global food bill has risen 57pc in the last year. Soaring freight rates make it worse. The cost of food "on the table" has jumped by 74pc in poor countries that rely on imports, according to the FAO.
Roughly 100m people are tipping over the survival line. The import ratio for grains is: Eritrea (88pc), Sierra Leone (85pc), Niger (81pc), Liberia (75pc), Botswana (72pc), Haiti (67pc), and Bangladesh (65pc).
This Malthusian crunch has been building for a long time. We are adding 73m mouths a year. The global population will grow from 6.5bn to 9.5bn before peaking near mid-century.
Asia's bourgeoisie is switching to an animal-based diet. If they follow the Japanese, protein-intake will rise by nine times. It takes 8.3 grams of corn feed to produce a 1g of beef, or 3.1g for pork.
China's meat demand has risen to 50kg per capita from 20kg in 1980, but this has been gradual. The FAO insists that this dietary shift is "not the cause of the sudden food price spike that began in 2005".
Hedge funds played their part in the violent rise in spot prices early this year. To that extent they can be held responsible for the death of African and Asian children. Tougher margin rules on the commodity exchanges might have stopped the racket. Capitalism must police itself, or be policed.
Even so, the funds closed their killer "long" trades in early March, causing a brief 20pc mini-crash in grains. The speculators are now neutral on the COMEX casino in New York.
What about the California state retirement fund (Calpers), the Norwegian Petroleum fund, the Dutch pension giants, et al, pushing a wall of money into the $200bn commodity index funds?
They have undoubtedly bid up the futures contracts, but the FAO says this has no durable effect on food prices. These index funds never take delivery of grains. All they do is distort the shape of the maturities curve years ahead, allowing farmers to lock in eye-watering prices. That should cause more planting.
Is there any more land? Yes, in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, where acreage planted has fallen 12pc since Soviet days. Existing grain yields are 2.4 tonnes per hectare in Ukraine, 1.8 in Russia, and 1.11 in Kazakhstan, com-pared with 6.39 in the US. Investment would do wonders here. But the structure is chaotic.
Brazil has the world's biggest reserves of "potential arable land" with 483m hectares (it currently cultivates 67m), and Colombia has 62m - both offering biannual harvests.
The catch is obvious. "The idea that you cut down rainforest to actually grow biofuels seems profoundly stupid," said Professor John Beddington, Britain's chief scientific adviser.
Goldman Sachs says the cost of ethanol from corn is $81 a barrel (oil equivalent), with wheat at $145 and soybeans $232. It is built on subsidy.
New technology may open the way for the use of non-edible grain stalks to make ethanol, but for now the only biofuel crop that genuinely pays its way is sugar cane ($35). Sugar is carbohydrate: ideal for fuel. Grains contain proteins made of nitrogen: useless for fuel, but vital for people.
Whatever the arguments, politics is intruding. Food export controls have been imposed by Russia, China, India, Vietnam, Argentina, and Serbia. We are disturbingly close to a chain reaction that could shatter our assumptions about food security.
The Philippines - a country with ample foreign reserves of $36bn (Britain has $27bn) - last week had to enlist its embassies to hunt for grain supplies after China withheld shipments. Washington stepped in, pledging "absolutely" to cover Philippine grain needs. A new Cold War is taking shape, around energy and food.
The world intelligentsia has been asleep at the wheel. While we rage over global warming, global hunger has swept in under the radar screen.
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We drive, they starve. The mass diversion of the North American grain harvest into ethanol plants for fuel is reaching its political and moral limits.
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The Left takes every opportunity to scold the rest of us about “sustainability”. It was the Left who lead the rush to replacing inedible coal and oil with food grains as the feedstock of hydrocarbons from which to refine our fuels.
It was the Left who keeps up the drumbeat of Global Warming, which they spin into yet another reason for us to burn food in our vehicles. It is the Left that destroys wealth, so that poor people have even less with which to purchase the necessities of life. It is the Left that insists on disrupting markets with decrees from committees of elites who always know best, but rarely have a real stake in the outcome at the personal level.
If there is any blame for food riots in the third world, riots that may have collapsed the government of Haiti, it is the Left, who cannot and will not accept any responsibility. They will pin in on the usual villains — Wal-Mart, human greed, the automobile, anything except the failed ideology and policy chaos of the Left.
< The UN says it takes 232kg of corn to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol. That is enough to feed a child for a year. Last week, the UN predicted “massacres” unless the biofuel policy is halted. >
Horse pucky!! People are starving because of the greater expense in eating imported foodstuffs. It is the cost of oil that has dramatically increased the food prices due to the skyrocketing expense of shipping anything anywhere nowadays.
In other words, capitalism is bad and must be replaced by socialism, communism, totalitarianism, fascism, take your pick. If this were a high school theme paper, I would give the writer an "F" for F'ing Ignorant.
Al Gore lied, people died. I can just see the website now: worldwide death toll count from the global warming hysteria. Call it Inconvenient Count.
And Brazil discovers another deep water oil field containing 800 BILLION barrels.
The insanity continues.....
“An Inconvenient Death”
“An Inconvenient Boatload of Deaths”
We either pay the farmers to grow crops for ethanol...
...or we pay the farmers to let their fields go to waste.
That’s what is happening. The crops the farmers are growing are in fields that would not be used, due to the government paying farmers not to plant crops, not to ‘grow more food’ like everyone is claiming.
Those extra crops would not be there for food in either case, thanks to government subsidies.
Please don’t fall into the trap a lot of libertarians and conservatives have fallen into on this issue. If the price for selling food was equal to, or better than, the government handouts for either ethanol or letting the field go to waste, then there would not be a problem.
If those government handouts weren’t there for either of those two things, the corporations would be producing as much food as they could sell...but wait, destroying the family farm is ‘bad’ according to the government handout crowd...
The cost of food would come down if OPEC wasn’t sucking dry those nations that produce food.
our elitist rich in this country would rather have civil wars start across the globe just so they can claim to be so enviromentally superior?....
giving tax credits and incentives and other govt money to have people invest in burning food sources for fuel falls into one of these categories...I just don't know which...
we are lectured about global warming...we are told that there is no discussion about it...there is global warming and the experts KNOW how to fix it....
that sure sounds like socialism..communism...totalitarianism and fascism to me...
A barrel a bushel works for me.
How much grain does it take to provide the U.K. with a couple million tons of meat each year? If the citizens of the U.K. would just eat “green”(1 kilo of grain/person/day) they could reduce global warming, feed the world’s hungry, have lots of carbon credits and sustainability too.
Of course when you’re hungry all the time it does rather divert the mind from the environment.
It is about time the rest of the world catches up.
STOP BURNING FOOD, FOOLS!
It was the Left who lead the rush to replacing inedible coal and oil with food grains as the feedstock of hydrocarbons from which to refine our fuels.
-—-<>-—-<>-—-<>-—-<>-—-<>——
Dead On. We need to stop burning food!
The world intelligentsia has been asleep at the wheel. While we rage over global warming, global hunger has swept in under the radar screen.-—-<>-—-<>-—-<>-—-<>-—-<>--—Al Gore lied, people died. I can just see the website now: worldwide death toll count from the global warming hysteria. Call it Inconvenient Count.
I certainly agree.
Time to end all this stupidity about CO2 which is, after all, PLANT FOOD!!!!
algore Lied, People Died.
Actually, the cost of corn and wheat has increased by much more than the cost of oil. Never before has food cost increased as it has recently. Part of the reason is the value of the dollar. Part is due to recent crop failures, especially in Russia and Asia. Part is due to the US burning food. Altogether, it has doubled-tripled food prices in the last 1-2 years. (This guy’s screeds against the market mechanisms is simply a canard.)
I suggest comparing the 10yr charts, especially of corn, soybeans, rice, and wheat, here:
http://www.fabsites.com/FabFutures.html
Little of the increased cost of food is due to transportation costs. It is real price increases.
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