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Ethanol Demand Is Boosting Food Prices Worldwide
hereisnowhy writes "The rising demand for corn as a source of ethanol-blended fuel is largely to blame for increasing food costs around the world, the CBC reports. Increased prices for ethanol have already led to bigger grocery bills for the average American — an increase of $47 US compared to July 2006. In Mexico last year, corn tortillas, a crucial source of calories for 50 million poor people, doubled in price; the increase forced the government to introduce price controls. The move to ethanol-blended fuel is based in part on widespread belief that it produces cleaner emissions than regular gasoline. But a recent Environment Canada study found no statistical difference between the greenhouse gas emissions of regular unleaded fuel and 10 per cent ethanol-blended fuel. Environmental groups have argued that producing ethanol — whether from corn, beets, wheat, or other crops — requires more energy than can be derived from the product."
But yeah, it's all about biofuels.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Ethanol is added to gasoline to reduce carbon monoxide emissions and ground-level ozone as an alternative to MTBE. Greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide) have nothing to do with it.
You're partially correct. Much greater fuel-alcohol production can be realized from Cane Sugar and Sugar Beets than from corn. The only reason why the ethanol crowd is so focused on corn is because America has a lot of it. Hawaii produces a great deal of cane sugar, but it pales in comparison to corn production. And sugar beet production is entirely focused on sugar. Still, both plants are useful for creating butanol, an alcohol with properties and energy densities much closer to gasoline than ethanol.
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The motivation for corn-based ethanol is political. While Washington advocates "free markets", American politicians of all political persuasions advocate subsidizing the production of corn-based ethanol because American agribusiness nearly owns the government.
Generally speaking, subsidies cost taxpayers dearly but do not pose a hazard. Corn-based ethanol is an exception. It drives up the price of corn and could lead to severe malnutrition in Mexico and other poor countries which cannot afford higher prices for basic food items. Subsidies for corn-based ethanol could indirectly kill people (via starvation) in the 3rd world.
Do American politicians care? No. They care only about making American agribusiness happy.
Cornell, Cornell. That sounds familiar. Oh yeah! Isn't that where Pimentel works? i.e. The same guy who's been trying to discredit ethanol for the past 30 years?
Studies that have been done independent of Pimentel's research have shown the exact opposite to be true:
List of studies
* "Estimating the Net Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol" - "We show that corn ethanol is energy efficient as indicated by an energy ratio of 1.24."
* "The Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol: An Update" - "For every BTU dedicated to producing ethanol there is a 34% energy gain."
* "How Much Energy Does It Take to Make a Gallon of Ethanol?" - "Using the best farming and production methods, the amount of energy contained in a gallon of ethanol is more than twice the energy used to grow the corn and convert it to ethanol."
* "New study confronts old thinking on ethanol's net energy value" - "Ethanol generates 35% more energy than it takes to produce, according to a recent study by Argonne National Laboratory conducted by Michael Wang."
Why is it that every study that shows ethanol as net negative has Pimentel's name on it somewhere, while independent studies are quickly showing the exact opposite to be true?
Pimentel's numbers were probably correct in the 1970s. It's not the 1970s anymore, and that guy is becoming a serious pain in the posterior.
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As a Pennsylvania farmer put it to me in February: "It looks like we're going to burn up the last remaining six inches of Midwest topsoil in our gas-tanks." I *heart* Jim Kunstler. Here's a link to his piece on ethanol, etc..
If corn prices doubled, then more farmers will plant corn, and it will cause the price of corn to drop. I'm sure at some point there will be a crisis where too much corn is produced, which will cause a plummet of corn prices and another "corn crisis", and less farmers will plant corn, cycle repeats, etc. It will all work itself out.
BTW, ethanol is not added to make emissions cleaner, it was added to replace MTBE. It's a widely held misnomer that it was added to decrease emissions or whatnot.
Regards,
Ross
Not all countries extract ethanol from corn. Nobody does that in Brazil. All ethanol here is made from sugar cane, which has a higher production rate than corn. And, here in Brazil, the use of ethanol never made any influence on the cost of food, just a little bit on alcoholic beverages. :)
There are a lot of cars here running on ethanol since the 70s. In 1986, more than 76% of all cars sold ran on ethanol. For a long time already, all gasoline sold here has 25% of ethanol. Many of the cars sold in Brazil now are flexible-fuel: they can run on any mixture of gasoline and ethanol. They are a huge selling hit. All all gasoline stations in Brazil sell both gasoline and ethanol
More information about ethanol in Brazil can be found at Wikipedia.
farmers have been severely pissed off about the low prices they've been getting. One frind of mine who farms poined out there's more money in hauling garbage per ton than selling corn per ton.
Exactly. Corn prices have been near historic lows, and now we finally have upward change (which apparently is something the under-educated news media doesn't grasp. Guess we know who flunked out of calculus in school).
I live in rural Iowa and work in Nebraska and have many friends who are row crop farmers. Both corn and soybean prices have finally increased past the government subsidy for minimum prices (which unfortunately has detrimental effects itself). Last year, farmers were dumping crops and not even bothering to store them due to the prices being so low. The took the subsizided minimum price and cut their losses. More farmers were squeezed out of the market. The U.S. economy has had a massive shift from farm-oriented rural economies over the past century (from 95% rural agricultural focused to less than 5%) which automation and technologies certainly improves, but the losses we've seen since 1990 has had little to do with any further automation.
Unless you've inherited at least 2,000 acres, you can't make the finances work in today's row crop economy. Those that are doing fine have more than 3,000 acres per family for corn and beans in our parts. At $2,200 to $3,200 an acre, you cannot purchase new land and go into farming and survive, even with considerable governmental support. You have to have a base of inherited land that has nearly zero cost as a base, and even then you're dependent upon subsidized government crop insurance. Consider these numbers: good corn yields around these parts of the Midwest are 140 bushels per acre. At $2.50 a bushel, your gross income per acre is a whopping $350. Less fuel costs, seed costs, fertilizer and other chemical costs, irrigation, crop insurance, tractor & combine machinery costs, contractor costs for spraying, trucking costs to move crops from the field to market, and any storage costs, you're looking at hard costs of $200-$250 per acre. $100 income per acre, before labor and land cost. Remember, I said you had to already own the land, because if you do the net present value math on 1,000 acres at $2500/acre (6% over 10 years), you'll be paying $340 per year per acre - which is almost as much as your gross profit itself. Care to dive into farming?
So understand that corn prices have been historically low, and now they are finally changing due to demand for the product. Any economist worth his salt can tell you the crops being produced aren't priced right when the total profit from the sale of those crops barely covers the cost of dormant land, let alone all the other expenses (using pragmatic numbers assuming 10% margins bearing full costs, we should expect to see $7 to $8 dollar corn per bushel, or must see a dramatic devaluation in farmland prices). Foreign subsidization of corn crop production has also kept prices unnaturally low, as well as import barriers on U.S. product. Just like global warming, you cannot have a rational perspective if you accept only the extreme outliers at one tail and call that a central tendency. Prices will change, and in this case, regression to the mean is going to occur (meaning that things tend to want to go back to the normal medium, rather than staying at the extremes).
If you're looking for things to panic about, this isn't one of them. Be thankful that we won't lose even more U.S. crop production human capital, or the natural correction of this unnatural trend will be even more dramatic. Be encouraged that poor foreign farmers in Mexico, South America and elsewhere are being paid more for their crops, instead of throwing a couple more billion dollars at the oil elites. If you hate big business, hate the multi-billionaire clubs, hate corrupt oil cartels, then spend your gas money on ethanol fuel and biodiesel.
We can produce far more ethanol from sugar, switchgrass, and hemp. We need to re-organize our national priorities to explore these crops and keep corn as food, not as fuel. Sorry corn lobby. When you use E85 the difference in emissions in undeniable. Who cares about E10. Its time to do what Brazil has already done and get off Gas, and jump on a fuel we can create domestically and sustain a healthier world.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Only applies to spent fuel. You don't reprocess decommissioned reactor vessels. And reprocessing still leaves the fission products to deal with, as well as mining and processing tailings.
The problem is that reprocessing isn't economical at current conditions - which is why initial U.S. attempts failed and why Germany is ending their program.
This might change if all the external costs were included; but then if all the external costs were included, we wouldn't even be considering plutonium and uranium fission.
(We wouldn't be considering biofuels from food crops either - biowaste, algae, and fuel crops like hemp and switchgrass, maybe bamboo. Growing food-grade corn to make fuel-grade ethanol is just plain stupid, and has more to do with lining the pockets of agribusiness than with meeting energy needs.)
And breeders aren't a perpetual motion machine. You still run out of uranium in the order of decades ro centuries. (Unless you go to thorium, in which case spallation "energy amplifiers" are a much better design. Those, and fusion, are where we should be looking to nuclear technologies.)
...until you separate them out, or change your bomb design to account for a different mix of isotopes. In 1962, the U.S. detonated a bomb made from "reactor grade" plutonium. (See 15th page of the PDF, footnote 5.)
Google for "Iran nuclear", and tell me that we're going to let every country on earth have a couple of plutonium factories, on the assumption that they're all too dumb to be able to do that.
Separation is not easy, but certainly not impossible. Many of the claims of difficulty of obtaining weapons-grade fissionables are based on the difficulty of handling highly radioactive waste. When you have martyr wannabe's standing by, though, a lot of these problems are solved. Shielding? Feh. "Come here, unskilled uneducated believer-type. You will die a glorious death for $CAUSE and be assured of a rewarding afterlife if you handle this Rock of the Gods exactly as I tell you..."
Indeed, given the fears of a "dirty bomb", bad guys don't even have to seperate, or achieve a fission bomb. Take a chunk of mixed Pu, stick it in the middle of a Ryder truck full of fuel oil and fertilizer, and drive into the center of $BIG_CITY. Let the good times roll.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Rainforest is carbon neutral. There is such a rich and efficient ecosystem that the vast majority of organic matter is recycled in some way. The forest mass is in a steady state (where it isn't being chopped down, of course). The topsoil layer is only a few feet thick and not rich at all - which is obvious when you look at the slash and burn pattern of agriculture there. Yes, it produces a significant fraction of the world oxygen output. But it then consumes it again.
What people forget is that plants consume oxygen! They need aerobic respiration just like every other living thing. During the night, they emit carbon dioxide. They just happen to produce a surplus of oxygen as a result of their growth process, because they source carbon from atmospheric sources (i.e. CO2). Animals in the rainforest all consume any dead plant matter with immense efficiency. And the animals get eaten by smaller organisms, etc, etc. All of these steps emit the carbon that the plant biomass originally sequestered.
An ecosystem only has a positive oxygen production (and carbon sequestration) when the biomass it produces increases. The biomass of the rainforest, per hectare, remains pretty stable (until you burn it). Ergo, the rainforest is not as commonly portrayed, "the lungs of the planet". If you were to enclose it in a huge glass dome tomorrow, the human race would not suddenly keel over from lack of oxygen.
I'm not saying it doesn't have a regulatory effect. The enormous amount of water transpiration alone must effect global climate in ways that we probably don't fully understand. And it's value as one of the most biologically diverse environments on earth cannot be understated. From a selfish point of view, more cancer treatments come from the rainforest than anywhere else.
But environmental campaigners really need to focus on arguments that are not disprovable without even resorting to spin and misinformation.