Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

More evidence that food prices are headed WAY up - at least
for chemically farmed grains and all the many products that
contain them. It's an opportunity for home gardeners to save
on the grocery budget, and for local, low-fossil fuel growers to greatly
expand their business.  Here are excerpts from this article. I'd listen to
MIT.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
------------------------------------------

"The world is in the early months of the greatest sustained rise in grain
prices, for all major grains including maize, wheat, rice that we have seen
in three decades.  Those three crops constitute almost 90% of all grains
cultivated in  the world... Maybe they won’t realize their taxpayer
subsidies to grow ethanol corn instead of feed corn are also driving the
price of their daily bread through the roof. ...  Food prices are exploding
as corn, soybeans and all cereal grain prices are going through the roof
because of the astronomical—Congress-driven—demand for corn to burn for
bio-fuel."

"This year the Massachusetts Institute of Technology issued a report
concluding that using corn-based ethanol instead of gasoline will have no
impact on greenhouse gas emissions, and would even expand fossil fuel use
due to increased demand for fertilizer and irrigation to expand acreage of
ethanol crops. And according to MIT "natural gas consumption is 66% of
total corn ethanol production energy," meaning huge new strains on natural
gas supply, pushing prices there higher."
------------------

The Hidden Agenda behind the Bush Administration's Bio-Fuel Plan
Buy Feed Corn: They’re about to stop making it…
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6407
by F. William Engdahl Global Research, July 25, 2007

That bowl of Kellogg’s Cornflakes on the breakfast table, or the
portion of pasta or corn tortillas, cheese or meat on the table is
going to rise in price over the coming months as sure as the sun
rises in the East. Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the new world food
price shock, conveniently timed to accompany our current world oil
price shock.

Curiously it’s ominously similar in many respects to the early 1970’s
when prices for oil and food both exploded by several hundred percent
in a matter of months. That mid-1970’s price explosion led President
Nixon to ask his old pal, Arthur Burns, then Chairman of the Fed, to
find a way to alter the CPI inflation data to take attention away
from the rising prices. The result then was the now-commonplace
publication of the absurd "core inflation" CPI numbers--sans oil and
food. Stephen Roche was the young Fed economist who was assigned the
statistical manipulation job by Burns.

The late American satirist, Mark Twain once quipped, "Buy land:
They’ve stopped making it…" Today we can say almost the same about
corn or all grains worldwide. The world is in the early months of the
greatest sustained rise in grain prices, for all major grains
including maize, wheat, rice that we have seen in three decades.
Those three crops constitute almost 90% of all grains cultivated in
the world.

Washington’s calculated, absurd plan

What’s driving this extraordinary change? Here things get pretty
interesting. The Bush Administration is making a major public
relations push to convince the world it has turned into a "better
steward of the environment." The problem is that many have fallen for
the hype.

The center of his program, announced in his January State of the
Union Address is called ’20 in 10’, cutting US gasoline use 20% by
2010. The official reason is to "reduce dependency on imported oil,"
as well as cutting unwanted "greenhouse gas" emissions. That isn’t
the case, but it makes good PR. Repeat it often enough and maybe most
people will believe it. Maybe they won’t realize their taxpayer
subsidies to grow ethanol corn instead of feed corn are also driving
the price of their daily bread through the roof.

The heart of the plan is a huge, taxpayer subsidized expansion of use
of bio-ethanol for transport fuel. The President’s plan requires
production of 35 billion gallons (about 133 billion liters) of
ethanol a year by 2017. Congress already mandated with the Energy
Policy Act of 2005 that corn ethanol for fuel must rise from 4
billion gallons in 2006 to 7.5 billion in 2012. To make certain it
will happen, farmers and big agribusiness giants like ADM or David
Rockefeller get generous taxpayer subsidies to grow corn for fuel
instead of food. Currently ethanol producers get a subsidy in the US
of 51 cents per gallon ethanol paid to the blender, usually an oil
company that blends it with gasoline for sale.

As a result of the beautiful US Government subsidies to produce bio-
ethanol fuels, and the new legislative mandate, the US refinery
industry is investing big time in building new special ethanol
distilleries, similar to oil refineries, except they produce ethanol
fuel. The number currently under construction exceeds the total
number of oil refineries built in the US over the past 25 years. When
finished in the next 2-3 years the demand for corn and other grain to
make ethanol for car fuel will double from present levels.

Not just USA bio-ethanol. In March Bush met with Brazil’s President
to sign a bilateral "Ethanol Pact" to cooperate in R&D of "next
generation" bio-fuel technologies like cellulosic ethanol from wood,
and joint cooperation in "stimulating" expansion of bio-fuels use in
developing countries, especially in Central America, and creating a
"bio-fuels OPEC-like" cartel market with rules that allows formation
of a Western Hemisphere ethanol market.

In short, the use of farmland worldwide for bio-ethanol and other bio-
fuels—burning the food product rather than using it for human or
animal food—is being treated in Washington, Brazil and other major
centers, including the EU, as a major new growth industry.

Phony green arguments

Bio-fuel—gasoline or fuel produced from refining food products—is
being hyped as a solution to the controversial Global Warming
problem. Leaving aside the faked science and the political interests
behind the sudden hype about dangers of global warming, bio-fuels
offer no net positive benefits over oil even under best conditions.
Its advocates claim that present first generation bio-fuels "save up
to 60% of carbon emission." As well, amid rising oil prices at $75
per barrel for Brent marker grades, governments such as Brazil’s are
frantic to substitute homegrown bio-fuels for imported gasoline. In
Brazil today 70% of all cars have "flexi-fuel" engines able to switch
from conventional gasoline to 100% bio-fuel or any mix. Bio-fuel
production has become one of Brazil’s major export industries as well.

The green claims for bio-fuel as a friendly and better fuel than
gasoline are at best dubious, if not outright fraudulent. Depending
on who runs the tests, ethanol has little if any effect on exhaust-
pipe emissions in current car models. It has significant emission,
however, of some toxins including formaldehyde and acetaldehyde, a
suspected neurotoxin which has been banned as carcinogenic in
California.

Ethanol is not some benign substance as we are led to think from the
industry propaganda. It is highly corrosive to pipelines as well as
to seals and fuel systems of existing car or other gasoline engines.
It requires special new gas pumps. All that conversion costs money.

But the killer-diller about ethanol is that it holds at least 30%
less energy per gallon than normal gasoline, translating into a loss
in fuel economy per gallon of at least 25% over gasoline for an
Ethanol E-85% blend. No advocate of the ethanol boondoggle addresses
the huge social cost which is beginning to hit the dining room tables
across the US, Europe and the rest of the world. Food prices are
exploding as corn, soybeans and all cereal grain prices are going
through the roof because of the astronomical—Congress-driven—demand
for corn to burn for bio-fuel.

This year the Massachusetts Institute of Technology issued a report
concluding that using corn-based ethanol instead of gasoline will
have no impact on greenhouse gas emissions, and would even expand
fossil fuel use due to increased demand for fertilizer and irrigation
to expand acreage of ethanol crops. And according to MIT "natural gas
consumption is 66% of total corn ethanol production energy," meaning
huge new strains on natural gas supply, pushing prices there higher.

The idea that the world can "grow" out of oil dependency with bio-
fuels is the PR hype being used to sell what is shaping up to be the
mist dangerous threat to the planet’s food supply since creation of
patented genetically manipulated corn and crops.

US farms become bio-fuel factories

The main reason US and world grain prices are soaring in the past two
years and now pre-programmed to continue rising at a major pace, is
the conversion of US farmland to become de facto bio-fuel factories.
In 2006 US farmland devoted to bio-fuel crops increased by 48%. None
of that land was replaced for food crop cultivation. The tax
subsidies make it far too profitable to produce ethanol fuel.

Since 2001 the amount of maize used to produce bio-ethanol in the USA
has risen 300%, trend increasing going forward. In fact, in 2006 US
maize or corn crops for bio-fuel equaled the tonnage of corn used for
export. In 2007 it is estimated it will exceed the corn for export by
a hefty amount. The US is the world’s leading corn exporter, most
going for animal feed to EU and other countries. The traditional USDA
statistics on acreage planted to corn is no longer a useful metric of
food prices as all marginal acreage is going for bio-fuel growing.
The amount available for animal and human feed is actually declining.

Brazil and China are similarly switching from food to bio-fuels with
large swatches of land.

A result of the bio-fuel revolution in agriculture is that world
carryover or reserve stocks of grains have been plunging for six of
the past seven years. Carryover reserve stocks of all grains fell at
the end of 2006 to 57 days of consumption, the lowest level since
1972. Little wonder that world grain prices rose 100% over the past
12 months. This is just the start.

That decline in grain reserves, the measure of food security in event
of drought or harvest failure—an increasingly common event in recent
years—is pre-programmed to continue going as far ahead as the eye can
see. Assuming modest world population increase annually of some 70
million people over the coming decade, especially in the Indian
subcontinent and Africa, the stagnation or even decline in the
tonnages of feed corn or other feed grains including rice that is
harvested annually as growing amounts of bio-ethanol and other bio-
fuels displaces food grain, in fact means we are just getting started
on the greatest transformation of global agriculture since the
introduction of the agribusiness revolution with fertilizers and
mechanized farming after World War II. The difference is that this
revolution is at the expense of food production. That preprograms
exploding global grain prices, increased poverty and malnutrition.
And the effect on gasoline import demand will be minimal.

Prof. M.A. Altieri of Berkeley University estimates that dedicating
all USA corn and soybean production acreage to bio-fuels would only
meet 12% of gasoline and 6% of diesel needs. He notes that though one-
fifth of last year’s corn harvest went to bio-ethanol, it met a mere
3% of energy needs. But the farmland is converting at a record pace.
In 2006 more than 50% of Iowa and South Dakota corn went to ethanol
refineries. Farmers across the Midwest, desperate for more income
after years of depressed corn prices, are abandoning traditional crop
rotation to grow exclusively soybeans or corn with dramatic added
impact on soil erosion and needs for added chemical pesticides. In
the US some 41% of all herbicides used are already applied to corn.
Monsanto and other makers of glyphosate herbicides like Roundup are
clearly smiling on the way to the bank.

Going global with bio-fuels

The Bush-Lula pact is just the start of a growing global rush to
plant crops for bio-fuel. Huge sugarcane, palm oil and soy
plantations for bio-fuel refining are taking over forests and
grasslands in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Soy
cultivation has already caused the deforestation of 21 million
hectares in Brazil and 14 million ha in Argentina, with no end in
sight, as world grain prices continue to rise. Soya is used for bio-
diesel fuel.

China, desperate for energy sources, is a major player in bio-fuel
cultivation, reducing food crop acreage there as well. In the EU most
bio-diesel fuel is produced using rapeseed plants, a popular animal
feed. The result? Meat prices around the globe are rising and set to
continue rising as far ahead as the eye can see. The EU has a target
requiring minimum bio-fuel content of 10%, a foolish demand that will
set aside 18% of EU farmland to cultivate crops to be burned as bio-
fuel.

Big oil is also driving the bio-fuels bandwagon. Prof. David Pimentel
of Cornell University and other scientists claim that net energy
output from bio-ethanol fuel is less than the fossil fuel energy used
to produce the ethanol. Measuring all energy inputs to produce
ethanol from production of nitrogen fertilizer to energy needed to
clean the considerable waste from bio-fuel refineries, Pimintel’s
research showed a net energy loss of 22% for bio-fuel—they use more
energy than they produce. That translates into little threat to oil
demand and huge profit for clever oil giants that re-profile
themselves as "green energy" producers.

So it’s little wonder that ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP are all into
bio-fuels. This past May, BP announced the largest ever R&D grant to
a university, $500 million to the University of California-Berkeley
to fund BP-dictated R&D into alternative energy including bio-fuels.
Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Program got $100 million from
ExxonMobil; University of California-Davis got $25 million from
Chevron for its Bio-energy Research Group. Princeton University’s
Carbon Mitigation Initiative takes $15 million from BP.

Lord Browne, the disgraced former CEO of BP declared in 2006, "The
world needs new technologies to maintain adequate supplies of energy
for the future. We believe bioscience can bring immense benefits to
the energy sector." The bio-fuel market is booming like few others
today. This all is a paradise for global agribusiness industrial
companies like Cargill, ADM and Monsanto, Syngenta.

All this, combined with severe weather problems in China, Australia,
Ukraine and large parts of the EU growing areas this harvest season,
guarantee that grain prices are set to explode further in coming
months and years. Some are gleefully reporting the end of the era of
"cheap food." With disappearing food security reserves and
disappearing acreage going to plant corn and grains for food, the bio-
fuel transformation will impact global food prices massively in
coming years.

Another agenda behind Ethanol?

Uh Huh. The dramatic embrace of bio-fuels by the Bush Administration
since 2005 has clearly been the global driver for soaring grain and
food prices in the past 18 months. The evidence suggests this is no
accident of sloppy legislative preparation. The US Government has
been researching and developing bio-fuels since the 1970’s. The bio-
ethanol architects did their homework we can be assured. It’s
increasingly clear that the same people who brought us oil price
inflation are now deliberately creating parallel food price
inflation. We have had a rise in average oil prices of some 300%
since the end of 2000 when George W. Bush and Dick Halliburton Cheney
made oil the central preoccupation of US foreign policy.

Last year, as bio-ethanol production first became a major market
factor, corn prices rose by some 130% on the Chicago in 14 months. It
was more than known when Congress and the Bush Administration made
their heavy push for bio-ethanol in 2005 that world grain reserves
had been declining at alarming levels for several years at a time
when global demand, driven especially by growing wealth And
increasing meat consumption in China, was rising.

As a result of the diversion of record acreages of US and Brazilian
corn and soybeans to bio-fuel production, food reserves are literally
disappearing. Global food security, according to FAO data, is at its
lowest since 1972. Curiously that was just the time that Henry
Kissinger and the Nixon Administration engineered, in cahoots with
Cargill and ADM—the major backers of the ethanol scam today—what was
called The Great Grain Robbery, sale of huge volumes of US grain to
the Soviet Union in exchange for sales of record volumes of Russian
oil to the West. Both oil and corn prices rose by 1975 some 300-400%
as a result. Just how that worked, I treated in detail in: A Century
of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics.

Today a new element has replaced USSR grain demand and harvest
shortfalls. Bio-fuel demand, fed by US government subsidies is
literally linking food prices to oil prices. The scale of the
subsidized bio-fuel consumption has exploded so dramatically since
the beginning of 2006 when the US Energy Policy Act of 2005 first
began to impact crop planting decisions, not only in the USA, that
there is emerging a de facto competition between people and cars for
the same grains. Lester Brown recently noted, "We’re looking at
competition in the global market between 800 million automobiles and
the world’s two billion poorest people for the same commodity, the
same grains. We are now in a new economic era where oil and food are
interchangeable commodities because we can convert grain, sugar cane,
soybeans—anything—into fuel for cars. In effect the price of oil is
beginning to set the price of food."

In the mid-1970’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a protégé of
the Rockefeller family and of its institutions stated, "Control the
oil and you control entire nations; control the food and you control
the people." The same cast of characters who brought the world the
Iraq war, the global scramble to control oil, who brought us patented
genetically manipulated seeds and now Terminator suicide seeds, and
who cry about the "problem of world over-population," are now backing
conversion of global grain production to burn as fuel at a time of
declining global grain reserves. That alone should give pause for
thought. As the popular saying goes, "Just because you’re paranoid
doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you."

-------------

F. William Engdahl is author of the forthcoming book, Seeds of
Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation,  Global
Research Publishing, and author of A Century of War: Anglo-American
Oil Politics and the New World Order, Pluto Press. He may be reached
via his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.