Food vs Fuel

[pai mei]

A very good article here :
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchin...ent_912170.htm

When the market sees that it is more profitable to produce ethanol than sell the grain for food, the food industry will be in trouble. Since ethanol is used as a fuel, its price will be tied to the price of oil. As oil prices climb because of the impending world shortage of oil, ethanol prices will rise. As a consequence food prices will rise as well.

It should be noted that if the entire US corn crop were converted into ethanol, it would satisfy only 16 percent of US transport needs. The amount of corn that goes into the gas tank of a large automobile could feed one person for a year.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6283992.stm

In its report, the IEA argued that biofuel production would hit 1.8 million barrels by 2012, more than double 2006 levels.

I want to show that ethanol is not the solution for the oil running out.Unlike oil it takes more time and energy to produce it, also it makes the food prices to rise, and as you can see from the article above 1.8 million barrels a day in 2012 is nothing, the world consumes now 80 million barrels of oil a day.

What happens in poor countries : the few that own the land begin to farm for ethanol, the food prices go up, all they care is that the profit from ethanol is bigger than the profit from growing food, nothing else matters. In this time poor people who don't own land have problems because less food is being produced and it costs more to buy.

A few more articles about this problem :
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle1917927.ece
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/18173/
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/4049

[lurkette]

I agree that ethanol is not a viable solution to our energy crisis. It's a renewable resource, but this is not a very efficient use of corn.

I just heard a report on NPR (sponsored by Nabisco or something) that predicted food prices would rise by 50% in the next 10 years, in part because of ethanol but also because of increased demand driven by population increases in China and India.

I'm curious - this is kind of a threadjack, but what effect could we expect on prices worldwide if industrialized countries dropped their domestic agribusiness subsidies? Conventional wisdom is that developing nations could then afford to compete on the global commodities market. Theoretically that would drive prices down, as there would be more free-market competition globally. Would we see a decrease in food prices even without the subsidization our suppliers are getting from our government?

[snowy]

What if the United States stopped producing high fructose corn syrup is the real question. Most of the corn crop in the United States goes for HFCS, because farmers get subsidies through the farm bill to keep producing corn to produce more HFCS, which is in everything from bread to soda to cereal.

Really, I don't have a problem with farmers deciding to grow corn for ethanol instead of growing corn to make HFCS. HFCS is incredibly unhealthy and a leading contributor to the obesity epidemic in the United States, as well as the rise in adult-onset diabetes. As for the foods HFCS goes into--it will probably end up being like the recent transfats issue, where in order to say they had 0 transfats, most food companies reformulated their products. HCFS is easily replaced with real sugar or other alternatives like manufactured fructose or glucose. I don't think we need to worry about the price of processed foods going up too much via the increase in the cost of sugar to put in the product. The fact is that our food prices are already going up due to the cost of transportation, so any difference created by reformulating a product is probably still outweighed by the cost of the oil needed to get the product on the shelves.

[Randle2I]

Why do people only focus on corn when talking about Ethanol? Ethanol can be made out of sugar, can be a byproduct of bio-diesel, and can even be made out of grass. Corn is not the only source of Ethanol. Ethanol is but one solution of many that if harvested correctly would greatly, if not completely reduce our dependence on foreign oil. However because people are unable to think outside the box they only focus on the negative aspects of it.

[pai mei]

Yes it can be made from other stuff, but today people waste corn for it.
Corn is also used to feed livestock, that is how food prices go up if the price of corn goes up
More energy is used extracting ethanol from corn than it is obtained. With sugar cane you get 2 times the energy you put in. Nothing compares with oil where you get 40 times the energy you put in.
Even if it's made from sugar cane or hemp it still uses farm land, which could be used for food or in the case of Brazil it uses land obtained from cutting more forest
And the fuel obtained is not "green", anything you burn produces CO2 - I don't think the global warming is man made , but I want to show that they lie when they call ethanol "green". They should decide : the global warming is not because of the CO2 or the ethanol is not "green"

[Redlemon]

Originally Posted by lurkette

I just heard a report on NPR (sponsored by Nabisco or something) that predicted food prices would rise by 50% in the next 10 years, in part because of ethanol but also because of increased demand driven by population increases in China and India.

As a counter-argument, there was this letter-to-the-editor in Time magazine on July 16th:

As a farmer I found it interesting that you would attempt to scare the American customer into believing that making our own fuel out of corn - ethanol - would drive up the price of other products. For example, a box of cornflakes contains only a few cents' worth of corn. I would hope that we would all be comfortable spending a few extra cents on a $4 box of cereal. What a small price to pay to help in our quest for energy independence.

I can't back up his statistics, but I found it interesting.

Originally Posted by onesnowyowl

What if the United States stopped producing high fructose corn syrup is the real question.

Yeah, that's my fantasy as well. It's hard to find drinks that use actual sugar, not HFCS.

[Vlad]

Originally Posted by onesnowyowl

As for the foods HFCS goes into--it will probably end up being like the recent transfats issue, where in order to say they had 0 transfats, most food companies reformulated their products.

Something to keep in mind, and I've found that a lot of people aren't aware of this...

If the amount of something is less than 0.5g per serving, the FDA allows companies to round the amount down to zero. When checking to see if an item has trans fats in it, check the ingredients. If you see the word "hydrogenated" anywhere in there, then it's got trans fats. Hydrogenated oils are trans fats, but often the quantities per serving are so low that the package will proclaim that there's "0g" which, sadly enough, isn't the same as "zero" in this case.

[shakran]

Originally Posted by lurkette

I agree that ethanol is not a viable solution to our energy crisis. It's a renewable resource

That's an important distinction that I don't think people realize. CORN is a renewable resource. Ethanol is not. It takes so much energy to grow the corn, transport the raw materials, make the ethanol, transport the ethanol, that the net energy gain is actually a loss. If you're spending more to make something than you get from it, it's not renewable.

[Reese]

Yeah, Ethanol is a "net energy loss." It's also a "net environmental loss." When more and more corn gets grown, top soil takes a huge hit. The good little underground critters are killed by the increased insecticides and fertilizer needed to grow corn vs other crops. When one crop is the favored over another, people start disregarding crop rotations and make the problems even worse.

[BadNick]

Originally Posted by shakran

...It takes so much energy to....transport the raw materials....transport the ethanol....

I just got this note today since I subscribe; the link: http://www.progressiverailroading.co...s.asp?id=11040

the headline:
Rail rates and service will be issues as U.S. ethanol production rises, shippers say; destination terminal capacity a bigger concern, short line says
The Bush Administration’s energy bill that aims to lessen the nation’s reliance on foreign fuel sources likely will boost U.S. ethanol production. But are railroads capable of moving large volumes of ethanol at a rate customers are willing to pay?

The short answer is “no,” according to Consumers United for Rail Equity (CURE) and other rail shipper organizations....