"It's a madhouse! A MADHOUSE!!!"
Posted on 04/18/2008 3:51:36 PM PDT by PROCON
To paraphrase the late, great William F. Buckley, Jr., someone must stand athwart the federal ethanol program yelling, “Stop!” The emergency brake should be pulled -- NOW -- before ethanol wreaks further havoc.
Poor Haitians rioted last week outside Port-au-Prince’s presidential palace, forcing Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis’ April 12 ouster. Haitians are enduring food prices 40 percent higher than last summer’s. Some have resorted to eating cookies made of salt, vegetable oil, and dirt. That’s right: Dirt cookies.
Developing-world denizens are taking it to the streets with growling stomachs. In Bob Marley’s words, “A hungry man is an angry man.”
Climbing corn prices have ignited Mexican tortilla riots. Enraged citizens in Egypt and Pakistan -- potential Muslim powder kegs -- also violently have protested premium prices for basic staples. Similar instability has erupted from the Ivory Coast to Indonesia. Resurrecting the defeated “import substitution” model of yore, India and Vietnam are among the nations that lately have prohibited grain exports and imposed government price controls. Kazakhstan, Earth’s No. 5 wheat source, just halted wheat exports, hoping to horde local supplies. One third of the global wheat market is now closed.
High oil prices and growing global food demand fan these flames, but government lit the match. Atop the European Union’s biofuels mandate, America’s 51-cent-per-gallon ethanol tax subsidy (2007 cost: $8 billion) and Congress’ 7.5-billion-gallon annual production quota (rising to 36 billion in 2022) have turned corn farms into monetary printing presses. Diverting one quarter of U.S. corn into motors rather than mouths has boosted prices 74 percent in a year.
Eager to ride the ethanol gravy train, wheat and soybean farmers increasingly switch to corn. Thus, hard wheat is up 86 percent, while soybeans cost 93 percent more. Since April 15, 2007, pricier, grain-based animal feed has helped hike eggs 46 percent. Got milk? You paid 26 percent more. Conversely, meat prices have dropped, as farmers slaughter animals rather than pay so much to feed them.
All this has triggered a race to the top of the grain silo.
On April 9, “the World Bank estimated global food prices have risen 83 percent over the past three years, threatening recent strides in poverty reduction,” the Wall Street Journal noted the next day. “The price of rice, the staple for billions of Asians, is up 147 percent over the past year.”
As ReasonOnline’s Ronald Bailey observed April 8, “the result of these mandates is that about 100 million tons of grain will be transformed this year into fuel…100 million tons of grain is enough to feed nearly 450 million people for a year.” In short, car engines are burning the crops that feed a half-billion people.
President Bush announced on Monday that the United States would provide $200 million in nutritional aid to poor countries ripped by such unrest. This may feed starving rioters, but it perversely requires that Uncle Sam allocate fresh taxpayer money to scour the mess he created by spending $8 billion in ethanol subsidies.
This is like buying a new hangover cure every morning after closing a new bar every night.
Bad enough if this suffering and strife were ethanol’s ransom for dramatic environmental progress. In fact, ethanol is Earth-hostile. Turning forests into corn fields kills wildlife-friendly, CO2-absorbent trees. Nitrogen-based fertilizers yield nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas. Irrigating corn strains fresh-water supplies and fills streams with agricultural chemicals.
Enough!
Congress immediately should abolish federal ethanol subsidies, mandates, and the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on imports -- including Brazil’s cheaper, cleaner, sugar-based ethanol. If scientists can develop ethanol that neither starves people nor rapes the Earth, splendid. However, this enterprise must not rest upon morally repugnant, ecologically counterproductive, economically devastating, government-ordered distortions.
This is all a sop to U.S. grain growers, arguably the most pampered and endlessly entitled people beside Saudi royalty. Since they are hooked on handouts, here’s one more: In exchange for a two-year federal tax holiday on any income they earn, every actual, tractor-driving corn/biofuel farmer should retreat quietly and let America’s experiment in state-sponsored ethanol enter the Unintended Consequences Hall of Fame. Compared to the global chaos that ethanol is fueling, this is a tolerable, one-time investment to pry these farmers’ and their Washington enablers’ hands off of our necks.
Corn 50c an ear at Safeway. On Sale!
Ahem. I believe this really is Bush’s fault. Time to stop this nonsense now, no mater who started it. End the Ethanol programs immediately!
The foresight exercised with respect to this ethanol debacle reminds one of the foresight exercised with respect to the aftermath of the Iraq invasion: in both cases, bupkis.
“Enraged citizens in Egypt and Pakistan — potential Muslim powder kegs — “
At least it’s not all bad news. ;>)
Mmmm . . . dirt cookies. Have some before your dirt nap.
Ted Turner was right. Cannibalism is right around the corner.On a brighter note less demand for fossil fuel will result in lower prices for us. ;-)
Fortunate that the price of fuel and fertilizer, and land have nothing to do with food prices.
Yeah! Bush didn't allow drilling in our reserve pools, didn't allow building new refineries,didn't kick the left wing lib weenies out of congress 'cause they wouldn't either. /sarc Blame yourself if you have for one minute accepted the "Globull Warming" premise and the other hoopla that is driving this madness.
Many here believed that this alcohol to fuel nonsense was good and would not raise food prices at all, even after I showed how to pick up some money trading futures.
Granted, the buy in for this market is high but there was money to be made going long on futures and LEAP options.
All of this is just MO and your mileage may vary.
"It's a madhouse! A MADHOUSE!!!"
Al Gore invented the Global Food Riot.
How freakin’ crazy are we!! When push comes to shove...really, really, that shove; we hold the upper hand.
They need to sell their oil to buy our, OUR food. So, now because we are growing corn for fuel...they have riots elsewhere, because we chose to be independent from them. NO, because we can demonstrate we don't need their difficult, unyielding, theocratic, doublespeaking, back-stabbing oil.
Look at what this whole ethanol debacle demonstrates!! We may buy their oil because it is cheaper, but ultimately THEY NEED THE USA. They need us for their damn food, cooking oil, and whatever else commodity comes from corn.
This may be the ‘sacrifice’ we need to make. The sacrifice that brings our troops home, the sacrifice that helps us win the war of ideas, the sacrifice to save democracy for our children.
Drill wells, build refineries, build nuclear power plants, open the coal fields closed by the co-president Clinton's, burn the EPA at the stake and tell the Iraqi's to either sell us all the oil we can use at $15.00 a barrel or let them defend themselves.
Save it pal! There is a huge problem right now and he still supports Ethanol in a big way! He's supposed to be a LEADER! If he blames Democraps for world wide Famine, believe me they would stop funding ethanol. He right now could suggest to drill in North Dakota. He's not! He could say that drilling in ANWAR is in the best concerns of national Security! He won't! Bush is not fixing the problem, he is exacerbating it! Blame the Democraps all you want, Bush aint leading to stop this insanity or fix it!
A farmer would have to receive $300.00 per bushel to be responsible for $.50 per year corn. The fact is that many Americans, and almost all of the 3rd world, have no idea how to feed themselves and whine and moan incessantly that they might actually have to pay fair market value for farm produce.
The idiocy of global warming, Ethanol and other envirowhacko policies are causing this country great harm. Maybe when food/fuel prices make both products unattainable to most, we’ll have change. Until that time, grin and pay!
Boo hoo. Tell it to the ragheads. I didn’t hear these same poor slobs bitchin’ when oil went from $30 a barrel to $115. Why is it the bedouins can charge whatever they want for THEIR commodities, but we’re somehow obligated to feed the world for free?
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
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