Research Update: Ethanol from Food Crops
When you stop to think about it, there’s something surreal about turning food crops into fuel when much of the world doesn’t have enough to eat.
So it comes as no surprise that sustainability pioneer Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute thinks it is time to reverse course on ethanol policy. In an Opinion article in The Washington Post, Brown ad co-author Jonathan Lewis of the Clean Air Task Force, point out that biofuels mandates are not reducing dependence on foreign oil.
Last year, the United States burned about a quarter of its national corn supply as fuel — and this led to only a 1 percent reduction in the country’s oil consumption.
Brown and Lewis argue that given “the environmental damage, the human pain of food price inflation, the failure to reduce our dependence on oil — it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that food-to-fuel mandates have failed.”
Taking the other side of the argument is Rick Wagoner, General Motors’ chairman and chief executive, who dismisses research that links biofuel production to rising food prices as “shockingly misinformed”.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation and others have linked biofuels production – alongside factors such as crop failures and the falling dollar – to the spike in world food prices. The agency has ordered research on the subject in advance of a summit on world food security intended to take place in Rome from June 3-5, the Financial Times reports.
Oil prices are a far bigger driver of higher food prices than ethanol- Rick Wagoner, General Motors.
Still, ethanol advocates are quick to use a similar logic when it supports their argument: that ethanol has helped to make gasoline prices lower than they otherwise would be, as reported previously on Research Recap.
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