Subsidizing world hunger

New figures show that one-quarter of U.S. grain crops go toward feeding cars with ethanol fuel and not feeding people. The United States is also the world’s leading grain exporter.

Biofuels and food are intimately connected. The history is rooted in subsidizing the U.S. corn industry, which has backed policy makers who want to end corn subsidies into a corner because of political opposition from corn-producing states. Politicians from these states aren’t likely to support policy that ends the guaranteed flow of federal dollars into their state, even if it is at the expense of world hunger and environmental degradation.

In 2007, the Bush administration signed a “pact” with Brazil to promote ethanol production for the international market. The catch was that the United States would impose a sizable tariff on Brazil’s sugarcane and sugarbeet fuel to give corn-based fuel grown here at home the advantage, effectively eliminating the U.S. market for Brazil’s sugarcane-based ethanol.

Congress in the same year mandated that the nation get an increasing amount of its fuel from biofuels, part of that could come from grain-based fuels like corn ethanol. Investments flooded the ethanol industry and by 2009, U.S. farmers doubled corn ethanol production.

The most efficient way to produce large amounts of corn is to use nitrogen-based fertilizers, but the runoff of these fertilizers are mostly responsible for the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, thousands of square miles so depleted of oxygen that sea life suffocates.

The pressure of the ethanol market and the assurance of subsidies and tariffs from the government have scientists and environmentalists worried that nitrogen pollution will only get worse. But U.S. taxpayers still subsidize ethanol production to the tune of nearly $6 billion per year.

The connection between grain-based biofuels and food prices is a scary and underestimated
concern because using grain to feed cars and not people drives up the price of meat, dairy, and any food made of or fed grain, like livestock. Combined with climate change, the risk of starvation to communities around the world is too great, especially in a future where basic food ingredients are unaffordable or inaccessible to those who need it most.

Promoting unfettered production of corn and grain ethanol without fully analyzing the impact to world food prices and environmental degradation is short sided at best, and at worse, a dangerous step toward global food insecurity.

As the leading grain exporter, and one of the largest donor’s of humanitarian aid around the world, the United States has a stake in reversing the trend of global hunger. Policies and subsidies ramming the production of grain-based ethanol forward is likely to further increase food prices, which exacerbate world hunger and push more to need humanitarian assistance.

In his campaign in 2008, Obama praised ethanol as a measure that “ultimately helps our national security, because right now we’re sending billions of dollars to some of the most hostile nations on earth.”

Not much has changed since then. Recently the EPA backed corn ethanol as a way of meeting the congressional mandate for biofuels set in 2007.

Grain and corn are not the only measure to propel the United States as a leading producer of ethanol. ExxonMobil has launched a program to produce biofuels from photosynthetic algae , which could prove to be more efficient than grain-based biofuels. Other ideas for producing ethanol use enzymes to break down inedible parts of plants, such as corncobs .

Ethanol is an inevitable ingredient for the future of our auto-centric society, but subsidizing corn/grain to produce fuel and not food is something that will counter serious action on climate change. The world is becoming increasingly hungry as environmental degradation pushes more communities to unsustainable lifestyles. The last thing this country - this planet - needs is the greenwashing of ill-advised policies to address the most serious environmental threat to humanity: climate change.