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With hungry, angry people taking to the streets in
countries on every continent — from Morocco to Mexico and Pakistan to
the Philippines and at least 20 other nations — the biofuel debate is
clearly moving into new territory. Arguments for and against using crops to make fuel
are no longer focusing on energy ratios or “independence from foreign
oil” or feel-good environmentalism. The headlines today are about
people needing food to eat — and right now. Politicians who once supported biofuel expansion are
now backpedaling fast in the face of irate grocery shoppers in this country
and an increase in hunger around the planet. U.S. Rep. James McGovern,
D-Mass., was one of the first national lawmakers to raise the alarm about
the impact of grain-based biofuels on food prices, telling The New York Times in
April, “If there was a secret vote [in Congress], there is a pretty
large number of people who would like to reassess what we are doing.”
Now 24 Republican members of Congress, citing high food prices, have come
out into the open to urge a retreat from the Energy Independence and
Security Act of 2007, which mandates rapid increases in biofuel production.
State officials across the country are also looking
to bail out of the biofuel rush. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has formally
requested that the federal government relax biofuel requirements imposed on
his state. Also responding to runaway food costs, the Missouri Legislature
is considering a rollback of its own recently passed law requiring that
gasoline be mixed with a minimum percentage of ethanol.
The agriculture lobby has legendary clout in
Washington, so current biofuel targets, along with heavy subsidies that
keep the industry alive, will stay in place for now. The 2008 Farm Bill,
which has entered the homestretch in Congress, cuts the corn-ethanol
subsidy by only 6 cents, to 45 cents per gallon, and the subsidy for the
“next generation” of ethanol (to be made from grass, straw, and
other cellulosic materials) will rise to more than a dollar a gallon. To
soften the rapid food-price inflation that’s expected to result, the
new law will increase food aid to lower-income Americans. Perhaps the starkest measure of the car
culture’s energy appetite is the fact that the state of Iowa, the
nation’s leading corn producer, will soon be importing corn. If a
meteorite were to land randomly in Iowa, there’s a 35 percent chance
that it would land in a cornfield; Iowa’s corn harvest last year
contained more calories than the state’s human population would
consume in 85 years of eating; yet Iowa will be hauling corn in from other
states. The grain will be fed to a multitude of new fuel-ethanol factories,
along with the state’s existing corn-syrup and livestock industries.
The world is learning fast that when fuel demand
competes with food needs for the sun’s energy, it’s not a fair
fight. The energy contained in the gasoline that fills a typical
SUV’s tank contains approximately the same number of calories
required in the annual diet of one adult. Or, rather than picking on SUVs,
consider the energy burned by a Prius hybrid on a trip from San Francisco
to San Diego and back. That would also feed a person for a year. Measured in energy units like kilocalories, world
demand for liquid fuels (gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, and now biofuels) is
currently more than six times the global demand for food. In energy terms,
fuel demand will shoot up three times as fast as food demand between now
and 2030. But such comparisons don’t prove cause and
effect. Can the pumping of ethanol into American fuel tanks really make it
harder for parents in Yemen or Indonesia to feed their families? An ethanol industry-funded group called the New Fuels
Alliance doesn’t think so. In a recent briefing paper the group
insists (reviving the old Cold War term for less powerful nations) that
“Third World food shortages are largely due to political and social
issues such as poverty, government corruption, and inefficient
distribution. . . . Corn prices have little impact on food availability in
the Third World. . . . Food availability per capita is at an historic
high.”
That last claim is simply wrong. A close look shows
that it was based on data from the late 1980s and early 1990s. The amount
of food available per person has been falling steadily since that time;
agriculture is not keeping up with humanity’s nutritional needs and
is now being asked to fill the tanks of vehicles as well. Nevertheless, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ed
Schafer told a recent International Food Aid Conference in Kansas City,
“Higher [fossil] energy prices are the biggest factor in pushing up
food prices.” He stressed, “Biofuels are a factor, but not the
factor.” President George W. Bush reiterated his strong, if
grammatically shaky, support for biofuels in a recent speech: “As you
know, I’m a ethanol person.” He has rejected the Republican
lawmakers’ call for restraint and blamed food inflation on people in
India who, he believes, are eating too much. Most experts agree that, indeed, several factors have
converged to intensify the food crisis. But in a very recent report the
World Bank left no doubt where the greatest responsibility for the current
food emergency lies. The report’s authors dispensed with two commonly
cited reasons for high prices, stating, “Droughts in Australia and
poor crops in the European Union and Ukraine were largely offset by good
crops and increased exports in other countries,” and “only a
relatively small share of the increase in food production prices (around 15
percent) is due directly to higher energy and fertilizer costs.”
The bottom line for the World Bank? “Increased
bio-fuel production has contributed to the rise in food prices. . . .
Almost all of the increase in global maize production from 2004 to 2007
(the period when grain prices rose sharply) went for biofuels production in
the U.S.”
As economists debate the theory of “price
transmission” — for example, the effect of rising corn prices
in Iowa on the price of wheat in Egypt — the real-world data are
coming in, and they show that the economic, physical, and biological links
between biofuels and food can reach effortlessly around the planet. In late 2006 to early 2007, the Mexican livestock
industry was hit hard by the rising price of imported U.S. yellow corn
(which is not eaten by people but goes to produce meat, eggs, corn syrup
for soft drinks, and, increasingly, fuel ethanol.) Domestic white corn, a
food staple in Mexico used mostly to make tortillas, was cheaper and was
being diverted to animal feedlots. The resulting scarcity and high prices
led to widespread unrest. The Chinese government has forbidden the use of
traditional cropland for biofuel production. But demand for biofuels is
rising in the world’s largest nation, so China is looking for biofuel
feedstock opportunities outside its borders, in Laos, Cambodia, Malaysis,
Indonesia, and the Philippines. China reportedly has a keen interest in
ethanol from cassava as well. To get enough cassava, a starchy root crop
that keeps some of the world’s poorest subsistence farmers alive,
China would have to import it from countries that are already struggling to
produce enough food. Farmers have been forced off their good cropland in
oil-rich Indonesia and Colombia to make way for oil-palm plantations. U.N.
investigator Jean Ziegler has documented the coerced or forced eviction of
subsistence farmers in Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, occurring with the
encouragement or even collusion of soy agribusiness interests. Rising
demand for biodiesel will put even more pressure on South American farm
families who grow food crops, according to forecasts. Before the recent devastating cyclone hit them, the
farmers of Burma were already staggering under a government mandate to grow
the shrub Jatropha curcas for biodiesel production, and rice production was taking a
hit. Food activists have long argued that so-called
dumping by the United States and other nations — that is, selling
surplus grain cheaply on the world market — drives down prices that
farmers receive in poorer countries, pushes them off their land, and
distorts agricultural production. Now, says the New Fuels Alliance,
“as the U.S. ethanol market absorbs grain surpluses that would
otherwise be dumped on the international market, small Third World farmers
have a better chance of staying in business.”
But a recent survey by the International Food Policy
Research Institute, in Washington, D.C., casts doubt on that happy
prediction. Looking at who buys and sells food in the markets of Bolivia,
Bangladesh, Zambia, and Ethiopia (countries all currently suffering food
shocks), the IFPRI found that while only 1 percent to 4 percent of food is
sold by poor farmers, 10 percent to 22 percent of food is sold to the poor
people of those countries. The conclusion: Many more hungry people stand to
lose than to gain from higher prices. Estimates are that each 1 percent increase in the
price of staple foods (in excess of “normal” inflation) will
subject 16 million additional people to hunger. The IFPRI projects,
“If biofuel production undergoes a drastic increase, calorie
availability in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to fall by more than 8
percent, and the number of malnourished children in the region is projected
to increase by 3 million [by 2020].”
As major world crops are drawn into the energy market
(in which prices are twice as volatile as those in the food market), it
appears that other staple foods are being pulled in with them. Noting that
in the world’s poorest regions people can spend 50 percent to 80
percent of their income on food, economists C. Ford Runge and Benjamin
Senauer of the University of Minnesota warn, “When one staple becomes
more expensive, people try to replace it with a cheaper one, but if the
prices of nearly all staples go up, they are left with no
alternative.”
The IFPRI predicts that the sheer quantity of food
available will drop by 5 percent to 8 percent in Latin America, South Asia,
and Africa if biofuels are aggressively pursued. Were food consumption to
shrink by a similar percentage in the United States, it might actually be a
good thing, but in regions where many millions are already malnourished it
could be a death sentence, says the IFPRI.
Cash crops — including sugarcane, coffee,
cotton, and lumber — have a long track record of crippling
nations’ ability to feed themselves. Energy crops grown in the
tropics are projected to follow in that cash-crop tradition. Brazil
provides a key example. Hailed as a leader in alternative fuels, Brazil has
based its ethanol industry on sugarcane, and that, according to labor
groups, has only perpetuated the exploitation that always attends the
growing of that crop. The country’s Landless Workers’ Movement
has condemned a national policy of encouraging sugarcane production for
ethanol on big estates and even on lands being resettled under agrarian
reform. Cane cutters are paid not by the hour but by the quantity they cut,
and, writes the Movement, “This situation has serious implications
for the health of workers and has caused the death of workers through
fatigue and the excessive labor that requires cutting up to 20 tons per
day. The majority of contracts are through third-party intermediaries or
‘gatos’ [so] formal work contracts do not exist.”
Another way in which biofuel production could make
food more scarce in the near future is by driving up demand for synthetic
nitrogen fertilizer. Lavish quantities are needed to achieve high
Midwestern corn yields, but synthetic nitrogen is even more essential to
the life of many poor nations. If farming depended solely on naturally
occurring nitrogen fertility, the planet’s cropped acreage could feed
only about 50 percent of today’s human population. In cornfields and rice paddies across the global
south, farmers pace back and forth with panfuls of commercial fertilizer,
metering out the precious granules by the handful. Meanwhile, in
America’s Corn Belt big farm implements stuff more nitrogen into the
soil than the soil can hold or crops can absorb. As natural gas (the chief
input for making nitrogen fertilizer) becomes even more expensive and the
world market decides who gets access to costly nitrogen, it will be ethanol
cropping — whether it’s with corn, switchgrass or other
nitrogen-hungry species — that goes straight to the head of the line.
The Worldwatch Institute’s Lester Brown has
been talking for months now about “competition for grain between the
world’s 800 million motorists and its 2 billion poorest people who
are simply trying to survive.” The competition for nitrogen is
forecast to be just as sharp, with the wealthier motorists favored to win.
More than a century of research, on top of millennia
of experience, show that cropping of annual plants such as wheat, rice,
corn and soybeans inevitably degrades the soil. It is estimated that almost
5 billion acres — 15 percent of the planet’s entire land
surface — is now subject to human-caused soil degradation, mostly
from agriculture. In North America, two developments have helped reduce
soil loss by one-third over the past two decades: adoption of so-called
no-till methods for reducing soil erosion and congressional passage of the
Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to take the most erodable
land out of production altogether and sow it to mixtures of native grasses
and other plants. The CRP accounts for a much bigger reduction in soil loss
than does no-till, but both have helped. Biofuels now threaten to undermine future food
production by reversing hard-won progress against soil degradation. First,
the high price of biofuel crops is leading farmers to withdraw millions of
acres from the CRP and put them back into cultivation. That will reduce the
useful lifetime of those soils, which need permanent perennial vegetation.
Second, as soon as methods for producing ethanol from cellulose have been
employed on a large scale, crop “residues” — the dry
stems and leaves left on the ground after harvest — will be collected
and hauled off to biofuel plants. A U.S. Department of Energy/Department of Agriculture
blueprint for supplanting just 30 percent of U.S. petroleum consumption
with biofuels would not only consume vast quantities of intensively cropped
grain but would also strip 75 percent of crop residues from the soil after
harvest. That will further deplete the organic-matter content of farm
soils. Concern that stepped-up depletion and pollution of water resources
by corn destined for ethanol plants will undercut America’s capacity
to produce food in the future is also rising. For decades the ethanol and biodiesel industries have
struggled to overcome technological, biological, and political obstacles
— and now, just as the biofuel express gathers some real momentum,
the prospect of worldwide hunger could derail it for good.
Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina,
Kan. His story examining the effect of ethanol production on water
resources, “The folly of turning water into fuel,” was
published in the April 10 edition of Illinois
Times.
This article appears in May 8-14, 2008.
