Corn ethanol: will it kill farming as we know it?

Share your Thoughts
Posted on August 11, 2007
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Greenhouse gas emissions, Consumer culture, Environmental disasters, Renewable fuels

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Switching for a moment from water to corn.

The NY Times preached about corn yesterday, and their editorial folks posed the question — will the US corn ethanol boom “finally kill American farming as we know it”?

Yes, it’s true. The turn towards corn for fuel for our cars has begun to distort the farm economy to the point where it could actually gravely harm it — especially for family or individually owned farms. The price of corn is rising, and as we have reported before, that will have an impact on the poor around the world who will now have to pay more for imports.

In the US, the other immediate impact is that the price of agricultural land is on the rise, and this is what may undermine and destroy the livelihoods of many farmers. As we know from any real estate spike, when value of property rises sharply, the winners are the folks with the money, big investors, big corporate actors.

…land prices have moved steadily upward. Land set aside for conservation is being put back into production. And a bidding war has broken out over acreage, a war that farmers are sure to lose to speculative investors.

In short, the ethanol boom is accelerating the inequity in the rural landscape.

Okay, you can read the rest yourself. Meanwhile, in the Business section today, I found this tiny article entitled, Record U.S. Corn Crop, Up 24%, Is Forcast. The article says that farmers have planted the most corn since 1944 because of rising prices, and therefore rising profits. Big agribusiness companies like Archer Daniels Midland are quite happy, thank you.

It’s like this, if I may make this comparison. Folks are trying to come up with ways to make cleaner-burning coal to power us up over the next few generations while not creating so much nasty carbon dioxide. Left out of the national discussion almost entirely is the way we get the coal — through mountaintopping and stripmining that is causing irreversible, stunning, heartrending destruction to Nature in the places where it is being done.

Now, to make a profit on a fuel with a very limited future, corn is being produced at mind-boggling scale, and more and more of it with genetically modified seed, which will wreak environmental havoc, destroy the family and local farm economies across the country, cause greater suffering among the hungry of our world — and all this to increase the percentage of biofuel that goes into your car with the gasoline, with little or no increase in energy efficiency or reduction in carbon emissions (read this post in one of our favorites, Gristmill, for an excellent summary of these issues).

The industrialization of farming in the hands of big corporations — this does not bode well, folks, for the future of eating in this world.

For a terrific article on this, that looks at the economics, energy issues, impacts on food supply and on the poor of our world, from the production of ethanol, check out this article, How biofuels could starve the poor, from the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs. I mean, you can hardly get more mainstream than that, right?

Now, just a last thought. Mr. Bush, our reputed president, says he won’t support a gas tax increase of a few cents to help pay for inspection and repairs of bridges across the country that may be in danger of a Minneapolis-type event. This guy wants us to go on and on like this. His war will cost more than one trillion dollars (I s’pect it will come out quite in excess of that), and imagine if we had those funds to build high speed, energy efficient mass transit, to support local organic farmers, to develop truly clean, environmentally sustainable alternative energy sources to take stress off our land, our waters, our mountains, our human beings — and repair our bridges at the same time — which we could do with a trillion dollars.

Just imagine that, and then see if we can find ourselves imagining our own lives into such a future. It will mean changes — very nice ones, actually.


Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

Comments

Leave a Reply