Corn ethanol factor in hunger

Even while achieving the best of desired outcomes we frequently also initiate unintended consequences. Too often these unanticipated pieces are disheartening-sometimes disastrous.
 
Take the recent creation of alternatives for gasoline. Those efforts have sought to reduce both auto emission pollutants and America's dependence on foreign oil. Gasoline emissions from our cars make unhealthy smog and loom large in global warming. A biofuel alternative to gasoline, therefore, seems like a no-brainer, making for great outcomes.
 
The scramble for a cleaner alternative for car propulsion led farmers in America's heartland to build ethanol refineries - giant liquor stills. These ethanol distilleries cluster in mid-continent because that's where our renewable raw material of choice for ethanol grows best. Corn is the prize.
 
Converting this crop to biofuel began during Nixon's presidency. Midwestern corn farmers were swamped with mountains of unsold bumper crops. Making their surpluses into hydrocarbon-free fuel made good economic and environmental sense.
 
Today producing corn ethanol biofuel sustains even more farmers across the prairie states. With government subsidies of 51 cents for each gallon, these agri-businessmen profit more from corn for car fuel than as chow for body fuel.
 
This industrial use consumes 10 to 13 percent of each annual crop. That's because, as a Brit noted, “The market responds to money, not need.” At last, the major unintended downside of corn as the ingredient in ethanol: the world desperately needs more food.
 
The conversion of thousands of farmland acreage to grow plants for biofuel, while of original good intent, has substantial unintended - and negative-consequences. We see the alarming costs on nightly news broadcasts and along the aisles of our grocery stores.
 
Around the globe we've fallen into a record food crisis. Millions continue dying; they have no food to eat. Though the hunger outbreaks are most pronounced in unfamiliar and remote places, we aren't freed from a responsibility to lessen the escalating famine.

A notable start would prohibit making a gasoline substitute with corn ethanol. This is not difficult. Better sources for ethanol are readily available. It's more effective to produce ethanol from algae, agricultural waste, non-food crops such as switchgrass and jatropha and forestry waste.
 
Research further shows that switchgrass, a prairie tallgrass (10 feet), for instance, can reduce net greenhouse gases by 86 to 128 percent compared to corn ethanol's 35 percent. Corn proves to be a less desirable gasoline alternative.
 
In any case, we must stop burning corn at the cost of human lives. Jeffery Sachs recently captured the problem, “Much as we need alternative forms of fuel, paying our farmers to fill our gas tanks with their crops is a foolish policy - with catastrophic results for the world.” As millions starve.
 
While horrible hunger in some places isn't new, today's global magnitude vastly surpasses prior experience. Millions face years of unimaginable, clearly deadly, hunger. Conditions for widespread starvation have arisen as critical factors - natural and manmade - became linked.
 
Rapid population growth, global warming, desertification, failing aquifers, abject poverty, inefficient transportation systems, etc. now interconnect to bring on terrifying calamities in human suffering and death.
 
Closer at hand, shoppers pay higher food costs. The price of most food products has zoomed upward because the cost of wheat, corn and rice commodities has doubled in the past couple of years. We pay more as consumers.
 
A huge factor for the rise in shelf prices lies in corn ethanol. As more corn acreage shifts from food production to a source for biofuel, demands for other food commodities rise. Scarcities now exist in these other crops. So their costs go up. The law of supply and demand plays out.
 
But the present food shortage can be reduced. Our government just needs to stop underwriting the escalating food prices with its corn ethanol subsidy. Then we'll see prices fall in our own food markets as corn regains its place as food.
 
Let's stop burning food, i.e., converting corn to fuel to be burned our cars. Other more effective non-food crops and waste are readily available for making ethanol. Each comes with fewer unintended consequences.
 
As we stop using corn for ethanol, more people around the globe will be fed and we'll again find more reasonable food prices in our favorite supermarkets.


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Gary Knox is a retired Yuma area school superintendent and guest columnist for The Sun.