The Other Side of the Bio-Fuel Story

With Miller leaving early this morning on his paleontology exploration, and rain pouring down, I didn’t have much to do today.

After exploring the farmer’s market that is on the town commons every Saturday, I headed to the Amherst public library, seeing as every building on campus is closed for the weekend.

The library is very nice (surely better than Frost). It has been able to maintain its homey, old-school feel while still integrating the technology of the times.

One complaint I have is that for some reason, the day’s papers are deliberately attached to long, bamboo-like, sticks. These sticks allegedly make it easier to read the papers, but they gave me all kinds of trouble.

Anyway, I want to talk about an article I came across while reading in the library. It wasn’t in one of the newspapers I had so much trouble navigating through, but rather in the journal Foreign Affairs.

Titled “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor,” C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer argue that an overemphasis on ethanol-based fuel is exacerbating the struggle to feed the World’s poor while providing minimal improvements to the environment and U.S. energy independence.

“Filling the 25-gallon tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires over 450 pounds of corn—which contains enough calories to feed one person for a year,” they write.

As ethanol is used more and more for fuel, they argue that the price of corn will prove to be prohibitive for more and more of the World’s poor. As long as oil prices remain high, corn-based ethanol too will be able to go for high prices.

Corn is a food-staple for so many of the World’s poor. They write of the ubiquitous tortilla in Mexico. In 2006, they observe, the price of tortilla flour doubled thanks in part to rising corn prices in the United States.

Corn-based ethanol is not the only bio-fuel having an impact on the poor. Soybeans, sunflower seeds, and cassava (“a tropical potato-like tuber”) are other food staples being used for fuel at an increasing rate, and the market prices for these goods are steadily rising.

Before reading this article, I hadn't thought of this link between energy independence and world poverty. The two pressing problems seemed to me completely unrelated. Yet in the global marketplace, repercussions can go near and far.

Runge and Senauer write about cellulose based ethanol which can come from raw materials like trees and grass without interrupting the global food-flow. The only problem is that cellulose does not have influence in Congress—corn does. So much more money, subsidies, and research has been put towards corn-based ethanol that alternative ethanol-based fuels are years behind it in development.

Runge and Senauer cogently argue that an overemphasis on corn-based ethanol is taking corn from mouths of the World’s poor into the gas tanks of the World’s SUVs.

Here is a link to the article “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor”. Foreign Affairs is a very solid journal that I highly recommend.