Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

After all the IPCC hoopla, I wanted to get back to another related topic — corn ethanol — one of the products that President Bush and big agribusiness hope will replace gasoline in our cars. We have posted about this before. Corn ethanol has some pretty serious environmental problems and severe limits as a replacement for gasoline.

What drew my attention to this again was an article on the front page of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on January 5, Fuel for car may be food for trouble. (Unfortunately, this article is now in their pay-for archives). It was especially intriguing since Wisconsin corn farmers are moving from corn for food and feed to corn for ethanol at a pretty good clip. The short-term profit margin is just too attractive to pass up, though this is a risky bet for the future.

The main information source for this article is the inimitable and highly-honored Lester Brown, head of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC, whose book, Plan B 2.0 I am reading right now.

The article starts by saying that:

“Soaring demand for corn to make ethanol could trigger higher US food prices and riots in low income countries as grain supplies tighten.”

It goes on to report that by 2008:

“US ethanol production will consume 139 million metric tons of corn, roughly one half the nation’s corn crop… If that estimate is even close to being correct, the resulting strain on supplies of the ubiquitous crop could have dire consequences.”

Like what? Like corn reaching the equivalent price of oil, which will reverberate through the food chain, affecting the price of things like breakfast cereals, meat and poultry, and dairy products. Like food shortages in poor countries, since the US is the largest exporter of corn to developing countries, accounting for 70% of global exports, according to this article.

So, with that information, it was with great interest that I read this article in the NY Times on Feb. 4: Thousands in Mexico City protest rising food prices. Well, whaddya know? And guess what food staple of Mexico is particularly under stress? Tortillas, tortillas made with corn.

Now, it’s bad enough that Mexico is no longer able to produce enough corn for its own people, especially since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) allowed US corn farmers to dump exports into Mexico’s market, suppressing domestic prices (the impact of free trade on the ecological crises is a topic we will cover in coming months). This is bad enough. But now Mexicans must compete with our cars for the food they need to, well, eat.

“Many analysts agree that the main cause of the increase has been a spike in corn prices in the United States, as the demand for corn to produce ethanol has jumped.”

The Times reported this sharp price rise earlier in January and its impact on the nation’s most vulnerable:

“Half of the country’s 107 million people live on $4 a day or less, and many of them survive largely on tortillas and beans.”

We like to emphasize the moral challenge of these issues, and Lester Brown set the terms around the issue very clearly in the Journal-Sentinel article:

“We need to be concerned that we aren’t creating an image of reducing grain exports in order to fill the gas tanks of our sport utility vehicles.”

Hmmm — food, or gas for our SUVs — food, or gas for our multiple family cars — food, or gas for cars instead of mass transportation alternatives — food, or……………

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More Lester Brown quotes from the Journal-Sentinel article:

“We are beginning to see…an epic competition between 800 million people who own automobiles… and the 2 billion poorest people in the world, many of whom are spending more than half of their income on food already.”

“…the grain it takes to fill a 25-gallon tank with ethanol just once would feed one person for a whole year. Converting the entire US grain harvest to ethanol would satisfy only 16 percent of US auto fuel needs.”