It appears to have been a mistake to rely on ethanol as one solution for climate warming and if this current research proves to be true, it just continues to validate the importance of doing good research and replicating it over time, prior to making huge investments of time and treasure and causing massive cultural changes to deal with an environmental problem, which itself is still not completely determined to be true at the level first reported.
DAVID A. RIDENOUR: Ethanol craze adds to hunger pangs of world's poor
- The National Center for Public Policy Research
Published 11:36 am PST Monday, February 11, 2008
The red-hot Congressional love affair with the alternative fuel ethanol is starting to leave many supermarket customers feeling mighty blue these days as they pay inflated prices for grocery staples.
Even worse, it's likely to dramatically increase the cases of chronic hunger, malnutrition and starvation in the poverty-stricken nations of Africa and Southeast Asia in the months ahead.
With the prices of some food staples soaring upwards of 40 percent as more farmers plant corn for ethanol rather than human food and animal feed, many environmental groups are raising the specter of global food shortages of apocalyptic proportions.
"We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history," said Lester R. Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of a new report on ethanol and its effect on food prices.
The increased amount of acreage devoted to growing corn for ethanol, he observed, means the U.S. will ultimately export less grain - further harming poor nations that rely heavily on food imports for their basic sustenance.
Brown projected that the 800-million human beings current living in hunger will rise to 1.2 billion by 2025.
"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," he said.
"As a result, the world is facing the most severe food price inflation in history as grain and soybean prices climb to all-time highs," Brown said, noting that wheat trading on the Chicago Board of Trade on December 17th pushed past the $10 per bushel for the first time ever, while a bushel of soybeans traded at a historic high of $13.42 on January 11.
