While drivers in the West are pumping it up at the gas station, poorer nations are struggling to put food on their plates. Understandably, the Third World is angered by the urgency with which the West is trying to fill gas tanks, not replenish empty bowls.

The United States and other driver-dominant nations are scrambling to find sources of alternative energy, with oil reserves growing scarce and fuel more pricy. Sadly, most governments are foregoing superior choices, like solar and wind power, in favor of ethanol, a fuel source that’s mostly converted from corn in countries like the US.

Although ethanol-based fuel could help to alleviate the world's fuel crisis, using corn as the source for ethanol is an absurdly inefficient tactic. The amount of energy output from corn is only marginally higher than the energy required to grow, harvest, process, and distribute the ethanol. At least with sugar-based ethanol (as in Brazil) and switch grass technology, there's a significantly higher energy yield.

Recently, the U.S. government offered farmers incentives to grow more corn crops to compensate for the shortage of traditional fuel.

The US Congress -- anxious to do something about America's energy boondoggle, anything -- dished out mandates and heavy taxpayer subsidies to America's agribusiness lobby to grow more corn for fuel in place of food.

What taxpayers may not realize, however, is that this tactic will drive up the price of food.

Ethanol may not seem as bad a fuel source as oil, but to those in countries where food is scarce, using food as fuel is a threat to their survival. The controversy over growing corn for fuel has ignited conflicts in countries where food is scarce and agriculture is weak.

The Financial Times reports:

Indonesia was yesterday forced to take emergency action to calm street protests over record soyabean prices triggered by US farmers reducing the crop to grow more corn for biofuel. …

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the Indonesian president, was forced to announce measures to boost local soyabean supply.

The move came a day after 10,000 people took to the streets in Jakarta to complain about the rising cost of one of the country's staple foods.

Controversy over corn crops for ethanol has also sparked protests in Mexico; Venezuela, Morocco, Pakistan and Egypt are also suffering from food shortages.

Between bad harvests, as in Argentina and Brazil, political unrest, rising prices (overall), food scarcity, and a slew of other factors, the outlook for ethanol as a viable alternative to oil isn’t promising.

From the Sri Lanka News:

Those buying commodities for fuel producers are competing directly with food processors for supplies of wheat, corn, soybean, sugarcane, and other key crops. Thus, the price of oil is setting the price of food simply because, if the fuel value of a commodity exceeds its value as food, it will be converted into fuel. The scale of the change is mind boggling...

The competition for grain between the world’s 800 million motorists, who want to maintain their mobility, and its two billion poorest people, who are simply trying to survive, is emerging as an epic issue.

Despite controversy abroad, growing corn as a fuel crop has yet to spark widespread debate among Westerners who prefer to fill their gas tanks before they feed the hungry.

Photos via flickr by Chad Fust, swanksalot, & Todd Ehlers.

Comments (3)

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B.J. said:

There was a segment on NPR about this issue yesterday, and they said that with all the calculated CO2 output that ethanol is worse for the environment, with the main factor being that more ethanol means more forests cleared away.

February 09, 2008

Bill said:

I hope that technology catches up soon (cellosic and wood conversion), because here in British Columbia we have masses of wood waste from logging that is burned each year. BC is a big place, several Californias? and we harvest timber across much of it. Debris from logging is piled and burned at the logging site, but so far there is no really obvious answer techologically to convert this to useful energy.

February 09, 2008

Papa_K said:

This is all wrong and has nothing good to be gained. All we are doing is encouraging the use of an oil based economy. By using food or plants as alternative fuels it is destructive to the environment. You can't keep planting corn year after year in the same place without depleting the soil of natural nutrients. Alternative fuel is thinking outside of the space between our ears. Some car companies have the right idea, hybrid hydrogen fuel cells. But we don't have a distribution mechanism. Whine whine whine. A few years ago (and I'm sure many of you computer using car drivers out there don't remember this) we used computers without a mouse. What a concept. No mouse. Command line and no gui. Or do any of you even remember the real purpose of putting games like minesweeper on your computer? To get you acclimated to use the mouse. Within a few years we couldn't use a computer without a mouse. If you wait till the last minute to do anything you won't have time to do anything in the last minute. Do it. Honda has a pilot program in two cities in California for it's FCX series. Looks like a great alternative. Opens new markets and trends. Sure we won't have any use for the oil based mechanics but if they don't stay up to date with the latest they will be out of a job. Wow what a concept, keeping up with the changing environment. Does sound rather futuristic doesn't it. Better than staying on this treadmill that takes us to nowhere. The FCX currently goes 500 on a full tank it's waste product is water. It goes 80mph. That's perfect. I'm not a nascar driver and if 80mph is the start of a hydrogen car (remember 10 mph was tops for the first gas powered cars) then we could top out at 200 mph within a few decades.

April 23, 2008

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