The Insanity of Using Food For Fuel

The push to use ethanol and other food based products as fuel is as inane and insane as one can get. It not only increases the costs for food - consider that corn-based products have seen significant price increases because more corn is being devoted to produce ethanol, but it reduces availability of those food products, especially in the Third World.

It also gets those regions that are already distressed environments, like in Central and South America, to expand cutting down forests to plant crops with the purpose of growing them to use as fuel. How exactly is that environmentally conscious? It isn't.

The use of food crops for fuel has turned into the worst of all possible solutions - skyrocketing prices for both fuel and food:

This is the other oil shock. From India to Indiana, shortages and soaring prices for palm oil, soybean oil and many other types of vegetable oils are the latest, most striking example of a developing global problem: costly food.

The food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, based on export prices for 60 internationally traded foodstuffs, climbed 37 percent last year. That was on top of a 14 percent increase in 2006, and the trend has accelerated this winter.

In some poor countries, desperation is taking hold. Just in the last week, protests have erupted in Pakistan over wheat shortages, and in Indonesia over soybean shortages. Egypt has banned rice exports to keep food at home, and China has put price controls on cooking oil, grain, meat, milk and eggs.

According to the F.A.O., food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

“The urban poor, the rural landless and small and marginal farmers stand to lose,” said He Changchui, the agency’s chief representative for Asia and the Pacific.

A startling change is unfolding in the world’s food markets. Soaring fuel prices have altered the equation for growing food and transporting it across the globe. Huge demand for biofuels has created tension between using land to produce fuel and using it for food.

You could reduce the amount of land disturbed for fuel production by relying on oil and gas wells using modern technology. For example, an oil rig facility only a couple of acres in size could actually pump oil for many miles around.

The same goes for a nuclear power plant, but those facilities are opposed by many environmental groups, not to mention the NIMBY types.

So, the end result is an energy policy of bad choices forcing even worse choices on economies that can ill afford to make any bad choices - such as those in the Third World.