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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Biofuel Mania Ends Days Of Cheap Food
  • Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 23:14:24 -0600


how biofuels drive up the cost of food

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18017.htm
Biofuel Mania Ends Days Of Cheap Food
By Gwynne Dyer

07/16/07 "NZHerald" --The era of cheap food is over. The price of
maize has doubled in a year, and wheat futures are at their highest
in a decade. The food price index in India has risen 11 per cent in
one year, and in Mexico in January there were riots after the price
of corn flour - used in making the staple food of the poor, tortillas
- went up fourfold.

The era of cheap food is over. The price of maize has doubled in a
year, and wheat futures are at their highest in a decade. The food
price index in India has risen 11 per cent in one year, and in Mexico
in January there were riots after the price of corn flour - used in
making the staple food of the poor, tortillas - went up fourfold.

Even in the developed countries food prices are going up, and they
are not going to come down again. Cheap food lasted for only 50 years.

Before World War II, most families in developed countries spent a
third or more of their income on food, as the poor majority in
developing countries still do. But after the war, a series of radical
changes, from mechanisation to the green revolution, raised
agricultural productivity hugely and caused a long, steep fall in the
real price of food.

For the global middle class, it was the good old days, with food
taking only a tenth of their income.

It will probably be back up to a quarter within a decade. And it may
go much higher than that because we are entering a period when three
separate factors are converging to drive food prices up.

The first is simply demand. Not only is the global population
continuing to grow - about an extra Turkey or Vietnam every year -
but as Asian economies race ahead, more people in those populous
countries are starting to eat more meat.

Early this month, in its annual assessment of farming trends, the
United Nations predicted that by 2016, less than 10 years from now,
people in the developing countries will be eating 30 per cent more
beef, 50 per cent more pig meat and 25 per cent more poultry.

The animals will need a great deal of grain, and meeting that demand
will require shifting huge amounts of grain-growing land from human
to animal consumption - so the price of grain and of meat will both
go up.

The global poor don't care about the price of meat because they can't
afford it even now. But if the price of grain goes up, some of them
will starve. And maybe they won't have to wait until 2016, because
the mania for bio-fuels is shifting huge amounts of land out of food
production.


A sixth of all the grain grown in the United States this year will be
"industrial corn" destined to be converted into ethanol and burned in
cars, and Europe, Brazil and China are all heading in the same
direction.

The attraction of biofuels for politicians is obvious: they can claim
that they are doing something useful to combat emissions and global
warming - although the claims are deeply suspect - without demanding
any sacrifices from business or the voters.

The amount of United States farmland devoted to biofuels grew by 48
per cent in the past year alone, and hardly any new land was brought
under the plough to replace the lost food production.

In other big biofuel countries, such as China and Brazil, it's the
same straight switch from food to fuel. In fact, the food market and
the energy market are becoming closely linked, which is bad news for
the poor.

As oil prices rise - and the rapid economic growth in Asia guarantees
that they will - they pull up the price of biofuels as well, and it
gets even more attractive for farmers to switch from food to fuel.

Nor will politics save the day. As economist Lester Brown of the
Earth Policy Institute says: "The stage is now set for direct
competition for grain between the 800 million people who own
automobiles, and the world's two billion poorest people." Guess who
wins.

Soaring Asian demand and biofuels mean expensive food now and in the
near future, but then it gets worse.

Global warming hits crop yields, but only recently has anybody
quantified how hard. The answer, published in Environmental Research
Letters in March by Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution in
Stanford, California, and David Lobell of Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory is quite simple: for every 0.5C hotter, crop yields fall
between 3 and 5 per cent.

So 2C hotter, which is the lower end of the range of predicted
temperature rise this century, means a 12 to 20 per cent fall in
global food production.

This is science, so that answer could be wrong - but it could be
wrong by being too conservative. Last year in New Delhi, I
interviewed the director of a think tank who had just completed a
contract to estimate the impact on Indian food production of a rise
of just 2C in global temperature.

The answer, at least for India, was 25 per cent. That would mean mass
starvation, for if India were in that situation then every other
major food-producing country would be too, and there would be no
imports available at any price.

In the early stages of this process, higher food prices will help
millions of farmers who have been scraping along on very poor returns
for their effort because political power lies in the cities.

But later it gets uglier. The price of food relative to average
income is heading for levels that have not been seen since the early
19th century, and it will not come down again in our lifetimes.






  • [Livingontheland] Biofuel Mania Ends Days Of Cheap Food, TradingPostPaul, 07/17/2007

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