ShareThisTo 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.(Deroy Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. E-mail him at deroy.murdock(at)gmail.com)
End the ethanol folly for food's sake
Submitted by SHNS on Thu, 04/17/2008 - 16:34
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People seem to think that corn goes into an ethanol plant and the only thing that comes out is fuel. Wrong. The byproduct of ethanol is gluten. Corn gluten retains 70% of the feed value that corn had going into the plant. This gluten is then fed to livestock. How much actual corn do people eat? Very little. How much meat do people eat? A lot. Ethanol is not draining away the worlds corn supply leading to higher prices. Higher prices are due to a weak US dollar that has other nations buying our grain combined with extremely high fuel prices that are making everything we buy more expensive. And how much higher would oil prices be if ethanol wasn't competing with it? So come on people, don't blindly lash out when you don't even know what you are talking about.
LIEs and DAMN LIES
This may have been the biggest journalistic piece of crap I have ever read. First of all ethanol production has very little if anything to do with the global wheat and rice supply situation. Wheat and Rice acres Worldwide are the same as they been for years. As for Brazilian sugar based ethanol being cleaner, please back that with some scientific facts. I rather doubt you can.
Wrong on so many levels
Where we you when farmers were selling corn at $2. Checked out what input prices have done recently? Pampered farmers-LOL. Try leaving the city and doing some research sometime before you write such nonsense.
Do a google search and it will show you what is really increasing prices-energy costs and crop failures (low supplies) I guess facts and 5 mins research was too much to ask.
Question: If a box of corn flakes has 5 cents of corn in it and the cost goes up a $1 why do you blame farmers? If it were the cost of corn then corn would be $100 a bushel now. Look elesewhere, it really isn't that hard.
did you check any facts?
Rice production in the US was up last year.
Wheat acres were up as well despite the rise in corn acres.
A visit to NASS will verify this.
Rather than reguritate senseless tripe from other websites maybe you should do a little research. Or maybe you should do some thorough research. I know that's a tall order in these days of America bashing and farmer hating but it will really open your eyes.
Maybe if you looked at the fall of the American dollar and how it affected exports.
Maybe you could look at the failure of the wheat crop world wide.
Maybe you could look at how the cost of oil has affected prices.
Maybe then you would see that your article is a folly and not the ethanol.
Do you think transportation
Do you think transportation costs to send grain/rice/etc. may have something to do with this? What about the cost of oil? Do you think that farmers should grow crops at below the cost of production? Maybe that is why they are growing corn? Why is it up to the farmer to feed the world for nothing--are they surfs? Do you think that there are no crop failures? (contrary to popular belief, not all failures are manmade) If you feel sorry for the poor people of the world, pry some of that money out of your own wallet!! What an inaccurate and onesided article!
This article
Why don't you do some research about the true problems with the "food crisis". You will find that nothing you have said is true. Rising oil prices and gouging by food manufacturers are the real reason. The raw grain put into food is such a small percent of the total cost. Look at the big profits by General Mills last quarter, they raise prices saying it's because grain prices went up. In reality they gouged the consumer and got record profits. If they raised prices the same % grain went up, the profits would have been normal, not record.
Quit blaming ethanol for
Quit blaming ethanol for rising food prices. If you're going to blame anyone then blame BIG OIL and OPEC. Rising energy costs are the main reason.
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer said the growing demand for crops to produce biofuels is only one reason, and not a major reason, for high food costs.
Schafer said, "Higher energy prices are the biggest factor in pushing up food prices." He said failed crops in many countries also contribute to the food crisis, which some have called a "perfect storm."
Ethanol has already displaced millions of barrels of crude fossil fuels. If this wasn't the case then the resulting lower supplies would mean even highr energy and food costs.
dirt cheap food
what a joke
a few years ago in Canada we were recievimg under 3$ a bushell for wheat and 4.50 a bushell for canola (a vegtable oil crop)
prices no higher than 30 years ago.
what was oil 30 years ago 10$/barrel
now its a 100$
a ten fold increase. if wheat had gone up as much it would be 30$ bushell not the 10 it is now.
food is cheap
at 4$/bushell there is 3 to 4 cents worth of wheat in a loaf of bread
at 12$/bushell there is 12 cents worth in a loaf
if you eat a loaf a day its 8 cents more a day Wow thats gonna crush you
driveing your car to work costs 5$ more a day but that is ok
those food costs don't hurt the developed world one bit
the poorest of the poor will hurt simply because the energy costs to get it will be more than the food itself.
with higher grain prices farmers in poorer countries will get more for what they produce. instead of being starved out as usual.
if you drive anything bigger than a subcompact you had better not bitch about the price of food
can farmers win?
SO there are all sorts of misconceptions and incorrect statements stated as facts here--as others have pointed out quite well.
My question to the liberal press here is this; Was it not just 18 months ago that the American farmer was the devil for over producing corn and other grains and driving the price of commodities so low that there was no profit in farming for the third world countries? I will garauntee you that there are stories here about how low commodity prices are all the American farmers fault--so what is the 'right' price for corn? Tell me how do I "the pampered" please you? We feed you, we are a business, there is no right answer in your mind so until you can answer that question--shut your yap.
The story is dead on but wait there's more
GM 's sudden stewardship of the environment is simply a way to continue to make gas guzzlers thanks to E85 an extremely inefficient fuel. The CAFE standards call for all car companies to acheive an average MPG for all vehicles. I believe the most recent number is 33 MPG. Well if you make the biggest money off of 10 miles per gallon SUV's you would hate to say good bye to them wouldn't you?
The CAFE standards has a loophole, that being that an E85 vehicle operating on E85 miles per gallon are ONLY figured against the actual amount of gasoline in the blend (15%) if you divide 100% fuel by 15% gasoline you get the multipler to the mpg (666) therefore a gas guzzling 10 MPG SUV is given credit for 66.6 MPG. If you sell one SUV like this you can have 3 vehicles only acheiving 24 MPG and this gas guzzling SUV and you average more than 34 MPG overall.
GM is not the only one taking advantage of this free ride Ford and Chrysler are too. The big three are heading down the toilet and this is just their hands clinging to the rim.