SUBSIDIES DRIVE US CORN ETHANOL BOOM DESPITE MAJOR DRAWBACKS

By Mark Sommer and - - Reprint | | Print |

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ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Nov 6 2007 (IPS) - The fuel source the US has chosen to start replacing petroleum, corn-based ethanol, is expensive, inefficient, and both environmentally and economically destructive, writes Mark Sommer, who hosts the award-winning, internationally-syndicated radio programme, \’\’A World of Possibilities\’\’. In recent years, giant agricultural commodity distributors like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland have successfully pressured both the White House and Congress to extend lavish, long-standing corn subsidies largely benefiting their corporate farming partners. But corn-based ethanol turns out to be a bad bargain: it causes just 13 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than petroleum, and a recent OECD report found that \’\’the overall environmental impacts of ethanol and biofuel can very easily exceed those of petrol and mineral diesel\’\’. The pressure on corn supplies exerted by ethanol demand has contributed to a 50 percent rise in the price of tortillas in Mexico in the past year, sending this staple food beyond the reach of the poor. China and India are starting to suffer from food price inflation rippling out from rising corn and soybean prices. Food is fundamentally a human right, not a mere commodity to be traded like any other at the expense of those who can\’t afford it. Not until we acknowledge this fact will we design both a fuel and a food system driven more by human values than shareholder value.

However, pushed by potent industrial and agricultural interests, the fuel source the US has chosen to start replacing petroleum — corn-based ethanol — is expensive, inefficient, and both environmentally and economically destructive.

Ethanol is not inherently a bad bargain, and, if certain technological hurdles are overcome, it could be made from agricultural and wood wastes and primeval prairie grasses and become a significant part of a diverse post-petroleum energy supply.

Though ethanol has been around since Henry Ford first considered it to run his Model Ts, the only nation that has aggressively exploited its practical potential is Brazil, which recently achieved energy self-sufficiency thanks in part to a burgeoning ethanol industry. A large portion of the country’s transportation fuel needs are supplied by sugarcane-based ethanol, which has eight times the energy efficiency of corn and would have long ago swept the American market had the US not slapped a 54-cent/gallon tariff on Brazilian ethanol to protect US corn interests.

In recent years, giant agricultural commodity distributors like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland have successfully pressured both the White House and Congress to extend lavish, long-standing corn subsidies largely benefiting their corporate farming partners to new 51-cent/gallon ethanol subsidies. But corn-based ethanol turns out to be a bad bargain on many accounts: it causes just 13 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than petroleum, and a recent OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) report found that ”the overall environmental impacts of ethanol and biofuel can very easily exceed those of petrol and mineral diesel”.

The economic costs, borne by the most vulnerable, are already apparent to the eight hundred million food-deprived people on earth, a growing portion of whom depend on international food aid for survival. The pressure on corn supplies exerted by ethanol demand has contributed to a 50 percent rise in the price of tortillas in Mexico in the past year, sending this staple food beyond the reach of the poor. China and India are starting to suffer from food price inflation rippling out from rising corn and soybean prices. International food aid experts say this food-for-fuel formula is likely to drive hundreds of millions more poor working people into hunger as they can no longer afford the staple foods. In addition, world food stocks are falling to levels too low to withstand a major hunger epidemic of the kind that drought, floods, and other climate-related events are starting to send our way.

If drawn from non-food sources, however, ethanol could yet provide significant benefits both environmentally and economically and obviate the ethically abhorrent choice between fuel for the affluent and food for the hungry. Cellulosic ethanol, made not from corn or any other food source but from agricultural and wood wastes and native grasses, offers a potential way around such brutal tradeoffs. First considered a decade ago, it has been slow to take off because of a shortage of capital and research, and a substantial technological obstacle — designing an enzymatic cellulose processing system that works cheaply and efficiently enough for mass production. No large-scale cellulosic ethanol plant has yet been built, and the enzymatic process remains more expensive than for corn. But biotech research may yet produce breakthrough strains of sugarcane, corn stover, switchgrass and other fuel crops that could further boost their energy yield.

The key to reducing the economic and environmental impacts of ethanol is using food wastes rather than the foods themselves and planting crops explicitly grown for fuel on eroded or disused land that won’t support other forms of agriculture. There is a kind of poetic justice in replanting the Great Plains of North America with the hardy prairie grasses that once fed millions of buffalo (which are also returning to the prairie as a healthier meat source than beef). Though it still lags far behind corn-based ethanol in subsidies and investment, cellulosic ethanol is starting to gain momentum. ”There is nothing in the last several decades that has generated such private sector enthusiasm and investment,” says Keith Collins, the US Agriculture Department’s chief economist.

Underplanned and oversold, the corn-based ethanol boom is already waning as its downsides become apparent. So much land has been planted to corn and so many processing plants built that the supply has outstripped the infrastructure available to ship it to market and the gas stations equipped to dispense it.

Yet even if corn-based ethanol is ultimately replaced by agricultural wastes, prairie grasses, and other biomass, we still face the challenge of bringing agricultural middlemen, some of the most potent political and economic forces in the world today, into line with urgent human needs that are far from their first priority. Ironically, high commodity prices don’t help the farmer any more than they do the consumer, but as the Depression-era ballad lamented, ”the middleman’s the man who takes it all.”

Food is fundamentally a human right, not a mere commodity to be traded like any other at the expense of those who can’t afford it. Not until we acknowledge this fact will we design both a fuel and a food system driven more by human values than shareholder value. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)