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Gotta love those ‘unintended consequences.’ In January, Europe’s steel industry threatened the EU. Force us pay through the nose for “CO2 pollution,” and we’ll take our profits, our plants and our jobs elsewhere. Now the European Commission has seen the errors of its ways. Temporarily. Since there’s no “international agreement” on the tactic yet. And EU industry can still escape their draconian CO2 taxes. The European Commission is going to exempt Europe’s steel, chemical and power sectors from ‘saving the world!’ You know, when Global Warmest think they’re ready again to set the world on fire and conquer carbon pollution. Let’s hope their matches are still all wet.
Ethanol policy threatens to starve the world
by Ernest Istook
February 23, 2008
Drought. War. Poverty.
These are leading causes of hunger, according to the United Nations. Soon we may add another.
Ethanol.
Across the globe, people are discovering it’s a new contributor to world hunger. Led by the United States, governments are paying companies billions to make ethanol from corn and other crops. The result: these crops are diverted from the food supply, creating artificial shortages and higher prices.
Even record harvests haven’t suppressed food prices. Instead, prices are soaring to all-time highs.
Corn that traded around $2 a bushel just two years ago is now well over $5 a bushel. The impact ripples through the food chain of milk, butter, eggs, flour, pasta and everything else, because dairy cattle, beef cattle, poultry and swine depend on the corn for their feed. When chicken feed doesn’t cost chicken feed anymore, then neither does anything else.
Other grains, like wheat, are also at record highs because farmers are planting less wheat and more corn, thanks to the ethanol incentives. Less supply, plus more world demand, means higher prices for wheat products, too, from flour to bread to pasta.
Full-scale food riots may arise in some parts of the world, as more and more grain is diverted into fuel production. The Earth Policy Institute reports that ethanol-related food protests occurred last year in Mexico, Italy, Pakistan and Indonesia. A price-driven stampede killed three and injured 31 at a supermarket in China.
“We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history,” the EPI proclaimed in January. “The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before.”
This problem became five times worse in December when the new “energy bill” became law. It dictates that Washington will pay a 51-cent-a-gallon subsidy on 36 billion gallons of ethanol each year, up from the previous 7.5 billion gallon limit. Even before this incentive expanded, official U.S. Department of Agriculture reports showed that ethanol was “eating up” 20 percent of the corn grown in America in 2006 – up from 6 percent in 2000 – a figure expected to rise in 2008 to 25 percent.
A 2007 report from International Food Policy Research Institute, or IFPRI, concludes that “Biofuel production currently adversely affects the poor through price-level and price-volatility effects.” IFPRI’s report also noted, “Since the beginning of 2000, butter and milk prices have tripled, and poultry prices have almost doubled.”
EPI’s president, Lester R. Brown, says, “We’re putting the supermarket in competition with the corner filling station for the output of the farm. The result is that more people will go hungry.”
Excerpted from WorldNetDaily
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