Ethanol Demand Is Boosting Food Prices Worldwide 599
hereisnowhy writes "The rising demand for corn as a source of ethanol-blended fuel is largely to blame for increasing food costs around the world, the CBC reports. Increased prices for ethanol have already led to bigger grocery bills for the average American — an increase of $47 US compared to July 2006. In Mexico last year, corn tortillas, a crucial source of calories for 50 million poor people, doubled in price; the increase forced the government to introduce price controls. The move to ethanol-blended fuel is based in part on widespread belief that it produces cleaner emissions than regular gasoline. But a recent Environment Canada study found no statistical difference between the greenhouse gas emissions of regular unleaded fuel and 10 per cent ethanol-blended fuel. Environmental groups have argued that producing ethanol — whether from corn, beets, wheat, or other crops — requires more energy than can be derived from the product."
Re:Corn Syrup (Score:5, Insightful)
Energy? Huh (Score:3, Insightful)
Who cares if it requires more energy or not? If the greenhouse emissions are equivalent, then it comes down to which is cheaper. If ethanol is less or the same cost as gasoline at the pump, then I want ethanol. I might even pay a little MORE because it gets OPEC's huge cock out of my ass. The US is one of the largest corn producers in the world. If we can make our own alcohol fuels domestically then we should pursue that.
Re:Monbiot:"People - and the environment - will lo (Score:1, Insightful)
First of all, pasting the entirety of the comment is not only rude, but unnecessary, and illegal (the least of the three concerns in my book, but YMMV.) Think before you do these things.
Second, a five year moratorium on biofuels is not what is needed. A permanent moratorium on growing plants in soil as a biofuel feedstock is what we need.
Classic (Score:4, Insightful)
In the long run, the most outspoken members cause the rest of the environmentalist community lose credibility (because the world doesn't end), and the politicians will just look for the next sucker cause to exploit. Too bad for the environment.
Re:Food is too cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
In the US, sure, this could possibly lead to smaller portions, but what about people in other countries that don't have enough to eat to begin with? The price of torilla's rising 50% in Mexico doesn't mean "smaller portions" it means NO portions.
Re:Corn Syrup (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Food is too cheap (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wrong people to blame (Score:3, Insightful)
Time to cease the hysteria (Score:2, Insightful)
These "solutions" will make a grand total of zero impact on anything, aside from providing an excuse for everyone to meddle in everyone else's business. I can't wait for the CFL inspector to come knocking on my door to make sure that I don't harbor any illegal standard light bulbs. Never you mind that CFLs contain toxic levels of mercury, so that whey they are tossed in a dump, the mercury can contaminate the soil and groundwater.
Even if global warming is frighteningly real (perhaps) and man made (doubtful), the only thing we should be doing about it is learning to cope. Return to a nativist lifestyle is not an option, and these solutions cause more problems (mass starvation anyone?) than they solve.
How dumb are these guys ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Do they need to buy a fscking clue ? Of course there's no difference. The combustion products of ethanol are pretty much the same as those of gasoline. Why do they need to do a fscking study about something that's covered in Organic Chemistry 101 ?
Re:Monbiot:"People - and the environment - will lo (Score:3, Insightful)
And the alternative is....?
Article is incomplete or misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
No shit. Ethanol releases carbon dioxide while it burns, too. However, its carbon dioxide was already in the atmosphere, absorbed by the plants, then released again when burnt. That makes it carbon neutral*, even though the emissions are the same.
Or, did they mean to take that into account? Who knows, the article is incomplete or misleading.
* I'm talking about the carbon in the plant, not carbon used in production. That's next.
Environmental groups have argued that producing ethanol -- whether from corn, beets, wheat or other crops -- takes more energy than is derived from the product.
No shit. Unless it violates certain laws of thermodynamics, of course the energy derived is less than the energy required to produce. But they don't talk about where that energy comes from. Maybe it's all from the sun, or from other renewal resources. Do they mean that the same amount of net fossil-fuel based carbon is released? Who knows, the article is incomplete or misleading.
Re: Food prices
The US subsidizes farmers who grow corn, because corn prices have been historically too low to support production. Now, corn prices are higher, and we're complaining about what it does to food costs? How about we take away the subsidies - clearly no longer needed - and give the money to food programs. Then, we look into the side effects of corn being the majority of all American's diets. See some of the repercussions in the recent documentary King Corn. [kingcorn.net] Maybe we could find something else that could substitute for corn in some foods. Like, say, sugar, if we'd remove our tariffs. (Hey, if folks from other countries could sell their sugar to the US for food, they'd have more money to buy our more-expensive corn.) Then, maybe we could find something better than corn to use for ethanol. Like, say, hemp or switchgrass. I'm sure if corn gets too expensive, some entrepreneur out there will start looking for alternatives.
But all of that would be constructive work toward making our planet a better place. It's far better to rant and rave and use single points of change as excuses to throw up our hands and give up.
Re:Energy? Huh (Score:2, Insightful)
The entire point of biofuels is that they are made from plants which absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Fossil fuels release carbon that has been trapped in oil or coal for millions of years. There is likely no way to tell from tailpipe emissions the difference between ethanol, biodiesel, and petroleum derived gasoline, and those emmisions should not be considered to be any indication on the amount of effect those fuels will have on CO2 and global warming.
Food is too cheap (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Food is too cheap (Score:3, Insightful)
Ask yourself, "Why is the price so high?"
In EVERY case of people starving on this Planet in this day and age is because of failed states. Period. Africa's food problems? Just look at their governments and how they appropriate food for their armies and buddies of the "President" (read Dictator). Sorry, the only food and starvation problems today are Government made. And no, I DO NOT mean some "evil corporation in their corporation offices being all corporaty" causing the problem. That reason is a smokescreen.
Re:Monbiot:"People - and the environment - will lo (Score:5, Insightful)
One option is hydroponics. The most promising crop is algae. A study done at Sandia said some years ago that growing algae in foot-deep concrete "raceway" ponds (a circular stream) agitated by paddlewheels suggested that it should be economical before diesel fuel hit $3/gallon.
Another option is to only make the fuel out of waste oils and cellulose. Biodiesel can be made out of waste animal fat, but honestly that can only provide a small portion of the demand. Tyson Foods is currently engaging in a trial in Ireland with ConocoPhilips. Cellulosic biodiesel is rapidly approaching as a viable technology.
You could also ignore the possibilities of biodiesel and go straight to butanol. Butanol is made by bacteria in the "ABE" process, in which a specific organism originally isolated as an aid to making TNT can be used to make fuel. ABE stands for Acetone, Butanol, and Ethanol. All three of these things can be burned in an ordinary gasoline engine, but Butanol is the most interesting compound in this regard as it is a direct one-to-one replacement for gasoline. The ABE process can be used on any organic matter.
You could go all-electric, which would require building more nuclear plants, and building breeder reactors to supply them with fuel. Using the proper types of reactors prevents the use of the systems to produce weapons-grade materials; all breeders are not the same (no pun intended.) But this would be in many ways a more major undertaking than the other options because the infrastructure to transport and dispense biodiesel or butanol already exists - precisely the same means used to transport diesel and gasoline, respectively.
Ultimately, the answer can only be a combination of these and other ideas. But it's easy to see that topsoil-based fuels are utterly and completely wrongheaded. They deplete soil, techniques used in mass-farming create hardpan and reduce diversity in soil, killing off the majority of organisms found there, and so on. Everything about modern farming techniques is wrong! It's simply not a sustainable activity on its own. Depending on it for fuel will cause a crisis rapidly. Certain parts of the world cannot feed themselves today because of their agricultural activities in the past. The Amazon is approaching a crisis state in which it can no longer support itself and it collapses entirely - eliminating the source of some 25% of the planet's oxygen.
If we don't get a grip on agriculture now, it will all be a moot point soon, because we won't have oxygen to breathe.
Re:Monbiot:"People - and the environment - will lo (Score:2, Insightful)
Battery Tech To Save The Enviroment (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Monbiot:"People - and the environment - will lo (Score:3, Insightful)
Published on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 by The International News
Starving The Poor
by Noam Chomsky
The chaos that derives from the so-called international order can be painful if you are on the receiving end of the power that determines that order's structure. Even tortillas come into play in the ungrand scheme of things. Recently, in many regions of Mexico, tortilla prices jumped by more than 50 per cent.
In January, in Mexico City, tens of thousands of workers and farmers rallied in the Zocalo, the city's central square, to protest the skyrocketing cost of tortillas.
In response, the government of President Felipe Calderon cut a deal with Mexican producers and retailers to limit the price of tortillas and corn flour, very likely a temporary expedient.
In part the price-hike threat to the food staple for Mexican workers and the poor is what we might call the ethanol effect -- a consequence of the US stampede to corn-based ethanol as an energy substitute for oil, whose major wellsprings, of course, are in regions that even more grievously defy international order.
In the United States, too, the ethanol effect has raised food prices over a broad range, including other crops, livestock and poultry.
The connection between instability in the Middle East and the cost of feeding a family in the Americas isn't direct, of course. But as with all international trade, power tilts the balance. A leading goal of US foreign policy has long been to create a global order in which US corporations have free access to markets, resources and investment opportunities. The objective is commonly called "free trade," a posture that collapses quickly on examination.
It's not unlike what Britain, a predecessor in world domination, imagined during the latter part of the 19th century, when it embraced free trade, after 150 years of state intervention and violence had helped the nation achieve far greater industrial power than any rival.
The United States has followed much the same pattern. Generally, great powers are willing to enter into some limited degree of free trade when they're convinced that the economic interests under their protection are going to do well. That has been, and remains, a primary feature of the international order.
The ethanol boom fits the pattern. As discussed by agricultural economists C Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, "the biofuel industry has long been dominated not by market forces but by politics and the interests of a few large companies," in large part Archer Daniels Midland, the major ethanol producer. Ethanol production is feasible thanks to substantial state subsidies and very high tariffs to exclude much cheaper and more efficient sugar-based Brazilian ethanol. In March, during President Bush's trip to Latin America, the one heralded achievement was a deal with Brazil on joint production of ethanol. But Bush, while spouting free-trade rhetoric for others in the conventional manner, emphasized forcefully that the high tariff to protect US producers would remain, of course along with the many forms of government subsidy for the industry.
Despite the huge, taxpayer-supported agricultural subsidies, the prices of corn -- and tortillas -- have been climbing rapidly. One factor is that industrial users of imported US corn increasingly purchase cheaper Mexican varieties used for tortillas, raising prices.
The 1994 US-sponsored NAFTA agreement may also play a significant role, one that is likely to increase. An unlevel-playing-field impact of NAFTA was to flood Mexico with highly subsidised agribusiness exports, driving Mexican producers off the land.
Mexican economist Carlos Salas reviews data showing that after a steady rise until 1993, agricultural employment began to decline when NAFTA came into force, primarily among corn producers -- a direct consequence of NAFTA, he and other economists conclude. One-sixth of the Mexican agricultural
Re:Energy? Huh (Score:2, Insightful)
The greenhouse emissions of oil and biofuel are not equivalent. By far most of the mass of a plant is made of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen that was extracted from the air. So when you burn the plant matter as fuel, you're putting a net total of ZERO greenhouse gases into the air--aside from a few trace elements, all the stuff you're putting into the air came out of the air!
As far as I can tell, the only time this breaks down is when oil-powered farm equipment is used to grow crops for biofuel. And, of course, if the crops are grown in such a way that the soil becomes depleted, you won't be able to make more biofuel and you're pretty much just as screwed as you were with oil (probably more so, since you won't be able to grow food, either).
Re:Let's not forget... (Score:5, Insightful)
Political play to get back the red states (Score:0, Insightful)
Bush's support was from the red states. Not just, you know, the states. But vast rural sections of the country. If you look at the maps of the 00 and 04 elections, county by county, the country is one big red blob, with little blue spikes where all the cities are. since a vast number of the people are in cities, but the electoral system is designed to balance population vs geography (one of the original compromises of the first 13 colonies...), it means he can use this vast rural base to help win the election.
But what are the industries out in these rural places? Growing corn is a huge one.
Bush came out recently saying we are gonna reduce gasoline by 20 percent in such and such years. Great. He has also been pushing for ethanol production. double great.
Now, if you are joe farmer, and suddenly you are selling your crop for twice the price you did last year, and Bush is the reason, who are you going to vote for? Bush, goddamnit!
The republican party is bleeding , nay, hemmoraging voters. The 'base' of rural folk is disgruntled with Mr Bush's war, amongst other things. He won the election on getting out the gay haters (sorry 'marriage and family defenders') and anti-evolution nutjobs.... but also by getting out the numerous rural military bases - places like Rapid City South Dakota, the only major city in western south dakota, would not exist without airforce bases that are held over from the cold war... this situation is duplicated across rural america.
But if those issues fall... those voters will not turn out in 08.
Bush has to save the republicans, so hooking his wagon to ethanol, which will pour money into the corn growers pockets, is the way to do it.
Or maybe not. But its an interesting theory, at least to me.
Re:Food is too cheap (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Energy? Huh (Score:1, Insightful)
Huh? If it requires more energy to grow the corn than is derived from the corn when converted to ethanol, then it is a complete waste of time and resources. So instead of paying OPEC, you pay a farmer, who in turn pays OPEC. Then you throw in your tax dollars to subsidize the ethanol production, and it costs you even more. Sugar cane works as a biofuel. Corn doesn't. It's a scam perpetuated by the govt. who is more interested in listening to lobbiests than finding a real solution to the problem.
Re:Corn-based Ethanol is a Tragedy (Score:4, Insightful)
If a farmer gets 100% of his income from agriculture, and 90% of his expenses are from buying agriculture products, he will still make a bit more profit if the market for agriculture products go up.
Anyway, this is all pointless, because in the end even the poorest country with the most infertile soil will have enough food for everyone if its a well run democracy that actually has a policy to bring food to everyone. If it isnt, well, then people might starve even if the country has both the money and soil to get food.
Re:Monbiot:"People - and the environment - will lo (Score:5, Insightful)
Environmentalists argue that high standard of living and technological progress is mutually exclusive with good stewardship of the earth. They will never be taken seriously by enough people to make a difference until they abandon their pessimistic ludditism.
High Fructose Corn Syrup (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the Farm Bill (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF? Basic economics. (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, energy is going to be scarce in the future, right? In the recent past, energy prices were almost equal regardless of medium (cost of 1 gal of gasoline was nearly the same as the equivalent energy in electricity).
The whole point of getting stuff from the ground is that we can do it cheaply in the sense that we get more energy out of the material than we spend extracting/processing/transporting it. That's why Oil is Big Business. If we could get the same thing from raking and burning leaves, things would be much different....
Spending more energy than we extract from ethanol actually *increases* overall energy consumption (over something like gasoline). This transforms ethanol from an energy "source" (loosely speaking) to something more of a carrier (like an efficient battery). I don't see how this can be a viable option (in anything but a very short-term view), for both economic as well as environmental reasons.
To me, it seems like using ethanol for cars is like running our car off non-rechargable alkaline batteries. (The require more energy to produce than they yield). It's just stupid. But right now government subsidies make "Stupid" "Profitable"... And that my friends, will be the decline of our great civilization...
Classic ... Re:Classic (Score:1, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Energy? Huh (Score:2, Insightful)
That's a problem with how biofuels are produced, not a problem with the biofuels themselves. Here's what I think we need to do:
Any questions?
Ethanol Efficiency (Score:3, Insightful)
by having more energetic mollecules -so while its true that each biofuel ton produces three times more CO2 than fossil, it will move your car three times longer too
Are you kidding me? Ethanol doesn't have more "energetic molecules." I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean - are you referring to temperature? Maybe net energy content?
Regular ol' gasoline is a more efficient fuel [wordpress.com] than ethanol - 1 gallon of gasoline contains 118,690 kJ of energy, whereas 1 gallon of ethanol contains only 82,958 kJ. You car will travel almost one and a half times (1.43x) further on a gallon of gas than on a gallon of ethanol. Maybe gasoline has more "energetic molecules"?
The problem is *big* bussiness know it's profitable... for someone else.
Still waiting for the punchline. In the United States, Big Agriculture, especially the midwest corn belt absolutely loves biofuel in general, and ethanol in particular. A few reasons why:
"Big Business" makes a ton of money from this. Difference is that "Big Oil" survives despite repeated, baseless congressional investigations and windfall taxes, while "Big Agriculture" flourishes because of subsidies and protections.
Government manded corn demand (ethanol requirements) + no other way to get corn or ethanol (tariffs and protectionism) = $$$
So get out of the corn business (Score:3, Insightful)
Big OIl v. Big Ag (Score:3, Insightful)
That demand for ethanol is raising food prices only goes to show that US sponsorship of the oil industry has to end, not that ethanol should be banned.
I don't think anyone believes that ethanol should be banned - but this is what happens when you tinker with a perfectly functioning market for something stupid like political gain.
The government doesn't "support" the oil industry - unless you call repeated congressional investigations, fuel taxes, and attempts to confiscate those "windfall profits" from Exxon's 10-15% margins "support."
There are huge tracts of land in the US that could easily be used to grow good ethanol crops (i.e. not corn) that are currently paid to sit empty
A few problems with that:
While I agree agriculture is oversubsidized (Score:3, Insightful)
So you want to insure there's overproduction to take up the slack if there's a temporary shortfall in supply. But now that you've told all these farmers to overproduce, come harvest time there's a glut in the market. Too much supply means the price drops, often to the point where the farmers (or agribusiness) can't stay in business.
This leads to the second reason for subsidizing food production - to maintain long-term production capability. Farming is a relatively slow process compared to other businesses. It has a very long time constant, often exceeding billing cycles by an order of magnitude. This makes farmers (or agribusiness) very sensitive to fluctuations in price. Farmer Joe puts in a half year's work raising a crop. If the price drops for a few weeks when he has to sell, that doesn't affect him for just a few weeks. It affects him until next year's crop. The money he gets from that sale has to carry him through until next season (assuming a single crop). Otherwise he goes out of business. Since most crops are harvested around the same time, a short-term price drop can cause a large portion of the nation's food-producing capability to go belly up. Not a good thing.
So you need to insure overproduction, but at the same time maintain higher prices than free market economics would dictate. And finally you need to insure prices remain relatively stable. The solution? Subsidies. The government spends a little money to guarantee there's enough food for everyone to eat each year, and that production can remain steady year-to-year. If you can make back some of those subsidies by using the excess crop for other purposes (humanitarian aid to other countries, corn syrup, ethanol, etc), then all the better.
The question of how much to subsidize I leave as an exercise for the reader.
Corn ethanol as a food buffer? (Score:3, Insightful)
However, what if instead of subsidizing farms to achieve excess food production we instead burn 10-15% of the food supply as ethanol? If there ever is a serious stress put on the food supply there's now a big buffer built into the system. Of course this additional buffer may not be necessary as there's already a buffer in place with food that's currently used to feed livestock (I don't know how much extra food we get if we start eating all this food ourselves though).
Re:Few Clarifications & Corrections (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Corn-based Ethanol is a Tragedy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Corn Syrup (Score:3, Insightful)
Then you shouldn't be growing corn! (Or rather, this many people shouldn't be doing it.) There is an 'opportunity cost' to everything. If your example is true, then that means the following. If you can't buy land and plant corn and turn a profit on it because the price of land is too high, that means someone else is prepared to pay more for the land than you are. They are willing to do this because they can use that land for something that gives a higher rate of return than corn growing. Simple enough, right? Here's the kicker though. That same statement means that you are better of selling your land instead of growing corn on it (if you, as stated in your example, have less than 2000 acres). Why? Because you can use the money from the sale to do something that generates a high enough 'interest rate' to be profitable. (I say profitable, but the economist living inside of me screams that it's a break even game.)
I understand if there are people out there that don't want to sell the land. Your family has been living on it since you kicked of the native Americans or whatever. It has sentimental value. But you can't use that as a whine-whine argument. You might use it while deciding things for yourself, but you can't use it as an argument to receive subsidises or to explain why the price of corn according to your reality is too low.
Re:Impossible standards (Score:3, Insightful)
I will only cover Ethanol and biodiesel and even then I can only scratch the surface because politics gets involved as well. One important thing to be aware of here is you need to grow plants to produce the particular fuel and that means land which may be of better use in growing food crops. It is a question of balance between land for fuel and land for food crop and in populous countries this is a major dilemma.
Ethanol: Requires lots of water so countries like Brazil which have ample rainfall would find this attractive, however you have to still look at the energy equation and in Brazil's case this is positive but only just. For many countries this is not viable unless supported by politics.
Bio-diesel: Can be obtained from any plant capable of producing an oil. One advantage of growing oil producing plants over sugar producing plants is you can do this with less water, in addition the energy equation is much more positive since biodiesel has a higher calorific factor than ethanol fuel or mixed petrol and ethanol.
The pollution factor is important here as well since you need to look at the pollution left from growing, harvesting, distribution and consumption. Actually biodiesel has the lower pollution factor but you also need to look at the scale and technology in producing the fuels so in poor countries ethanol may be the better solution where in wealthy countries biodiesel may be better. Even the reverse can be true.
What I am trying to get across is there is no easy one-size fits all (where have we heard that before?) solution. Each county must hopefully make the right decision with regard to energy production and consumption. Unfortunately there are many vested interests involved which makes arriving at a sustainable energy solution very difficult.
Re:Why should I change my expectations? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's called balance.