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"Food Crops For Cars Or The Hungry?
UN food agency: Soaring food prices to persist
Millions worldwide are vulnerable; developing nations especially at risk
 | Protesters are blocked by riot police as they try to march towards the Presidential Palace to deliver a mock birthday cake and gift to the Philippine President Gloria Arroyo on her 61st birthday in Manila. The protesters called on Arroyo to step down, blaming her government for rising food and oil prices. |
ROME - Even with bigger crops, soaring food prices that have sparked unrest across the globe are likely to persist, threatening millions of people worldwide, a U.N. agency said Friday.
Prices of bread, rice, milk, cooking oil and other basic foodstuffs have sharply increased in the past months in many developing countries, according to a report by the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization. Prices of wheat and rice have doubled compared to last year, while those of corn are more than a third higher.
Grain prices have risen as a result of steady demand, especially from China and India, supply shortages and new export restrictions, FAO said.
Even though world grain production is expected to increase this year by 2.6 percent to a record 2.16 billion tons, experts say this is going to have little impact on the prices.
“All indications we have is that this is not a short-term effect ... where the first year you have price increases and the following year there is an increase of supply that brings the prices down,” FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf said at a news conference.
Experts say price speculation and market failures will likely reduce the effect of boosted production.
However, the “Crop Prospects and Food Situation” report says that expected growth in production, especially in wheat and rice, could at least ease the tight supply situation worldwide.
FAO said that farmers in developing countries should be granted better access to fertilizers, seeds and animal feed to increase local food production.
Surging food prices, further stoked by rising fuel costs, have triggered protests around the world in recent days. The increases hit poor people hardest, as food represents as much as 60-80 percent of consumer spending in developing nations, compared to about 10-20 percent in industrialized countries, the U.N. agency said.
One person was killed in two days of rioting in Egypt earlier this week, while violence wracked Haiti, where demonstrations over rising food prices led to looting and clashes with police.
In Pakistan and Thailand, troops have been deployed to avoid seizing of food from fields and warehouses, the agency said.
“People are dying because of their reaction to the situation. People will not be sitting dying of starvation, they will react,” Diouf said.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24065922/
Ethanol fuel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ethanol fuel is ethanol (ethyl alcohol), the same type of alcohol found in alcoholic beverages. It can be used as a fuel, mainly as a biofuel alternative to gasoline, and is widely used in cars in Brazil. Because it is easy to manufacture and process, and can be made from very common materials, such as sugar cane, it is steadily becoming a promising alternative to gasoline throughout much of the world.
Bio-ethanol is obtained from the conversion of carbon based feedstock. Agricultural feedstocks are considered renewable because they get energy from the sun using photosynthesis, provided that all minerals required for growth (such as nitrogen and phosphorus) are returned to the land. Ethanol can be produced from a variety of feedstocks such as sugar cane, bagasse, miscanthus, sugar beet, sorghum, grain sorghum, switchgrass, barley, hemp, kenaf, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava, sunflower, fruit, molasses, corn, stover, grain, wheat, straw, cotton, other biomass, as well as many types of cellulose waste and harvestings, whichever has the best well-to-wheel assessment.
In 2007, biofuels consumed one third of America's corn (maize) harvest. Filling up one large vehicle fuel tank one time with 100% ethanol uses enough corn to feed one person for a year. Thirty million tons of U.S. corn going to ethanol in 2007 greatly reduces the world's overall supply of grain.
Jean Ziegler (United Nations expert on the Right To Food) called for a five-year moratorium on biofuel production to halt the increasing catastrophe for the poor. He proclaimed that the rising practice of converting food crops into biofuel is "A Crime Against Humanity," saying it is creating food shortages and price jumps that cause millions of poor people to go hungry.
The European Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development warns that “the current push to expand the use of biofuels is creating unsustainable tensions that will disrupt markets without generating significant environmental benefits.”
When all 200 American ethanol subsidies are considered, they cost about $7 billion USD per year (equal to roughly $1.90 USD total for each a gallon of ethanol). When the price of one agricultural commodity increases, farmers are motivated to quickly shift finite land and water resources to it, away from traditional food crops.
The 2007-12-19 U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 requires American “fuel producers to use at least 36 billion gallons of biofuel in 2022. This is nearly a fivefold increase over current levels.”
When cellulosic ethanol is produced from feedstock like switchgrass and sawgrass, the nutrients required to grow the cellulose are removed and cannot decay and replenish the soil. The soil is of poorer quality, and unsustainable soil erosion occurs.
Sugar cane ethanol works in Brazil because they have an equatorial year-round growing season, and the Amazon River – world’s largest fresh water supply. Locations with snow on the ground part of the year, short growing seasons, and limited fresh water supplies are less effective. Growing crops like thirsty genetically-engineered corn can require significant irrigation.
Ethanol production consumes large quantities of unsustainable petroleum and natural gas. Even with the most-optimistic energy return on investment claims, in order to use 100% solar energy to grow corn and produce ethanol (fueling farm-and-transportation machinery with ethanol, distilling with heat from burning crop residues, using NO fossil fuels), the consumption of ethanol to replace current U.S. petroleum use alone would require about 75% of all cultivated land on the face of the Earth, with no ethanol for other countries, or sufficient food for humans and animals.