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Massive diversion from the food bowl to the fuel tank

Fuelling the world food crisis

Bogdan Kipling, Chronicle Herald

CANADA will donate an additional $45 million to the UN World Food Program, the Canadian Press reported early Wednesday. Prime Minister Stephen Harper had approved the sum, CP said, and an official announcement was to follow.

News like this no longer is news in Washington. Here, “Economics of Hunger,” “Emptying the Breadbasket” or “Not by Bread Alone” headlines have become routine in the ever shorter news cycle.

Yesterday’s Washington Post front-page lead story summed up in seven words what’s going on: “Siphoning Off Corn to Fuel Our Cars.”

Yes, cars on American roads will burn up close to one-third of the enormous corn crop American farmers will grow this year. But because the United States is the world’s biggest producer of corn, an essential staple, this massive diversion from the food bowl to the fuel tank threatens to wreak increasing havoc from here to Timbuktu.

Nobody will do anything of consequence about it, but hand-wringing and pious appeals will be plentiful as never before. Governments will throw money at a problem that cannot be bought off, all placing their hopes in pledges of help and appeals to charity.

But that’s a fool’s paradise. To get a handle on what clearly is a world crisis, governments of the principal food-growing countries must act with minimum delay. They must halt the turning of food into biofuels.

If they don’t intervene now, the crisis is bound to spill out of control when the world’s hungry say, “Enough already.” At that point, throwing more money and sending more United Nations trucks loaded with American corn meal and Canadian flour won’t contain the crowds of, say, hungry Egyptians or Filipinos.

I’m not singling out any country or leader. President George W. Bush in Washington or Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa, the leaders of Argentina, France and Australia all share the burden.

They will have to tame their own farm lobbies and crack down on speculators. Mr. Bush will have to demand that Congress amend the wrong-headed farm and fuels legislation that opened the ethanol sluice.

With food priced out of reach, huge swaths of Africa and Asia are at risk of uncontrollable instability.

Worldwide, food prices rose 83 per cent in the last three years, according to World Bank figures, and the steepest increases are in the most vulnerable countries. But even in the United States, food costs 40 per cent more today than it did a year ago.

Depreciation of the greenback aside, when corn traded in Chicago goes up 30 per cent in four months, only the wilfully stupid would fail to see that something has gone fundamentally wacky.

And indeed it has. In Washington, the Congress allowed itself to be politically coerced by big agribusiness and its dupes, the environmentalists, to mandate the diversion of food to fuel.

America’s agribusiness giants like Cargill, Monsanto and ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) are raking in astronomical profits, not only from the corn they trade and convert but, in Monsanto’s case, from the patented seeds and fertilizers they sell.

That the hungry in Haiti feel the effects most cruelly is no surprise. But food riots in Egypt – the biblical granary – only underscore the severity of the crisis.

There is no single cause. In a perverse way, America’s huge and extremely productive agribusiness deserves much of the blame. Its only concern is the bottom line and if ethanol brings in more profit than a supermarket, agrigiants will put corn into gas tanks.

But well-intentioned fools are the main culprits. Had it not been for Maurice Strong, Canada’s self-anointed do-gooder-in-chief, Lester Brown, America’s early prophet of an idyllic organic planet, the ever-meddling money machine called Greenpeace and their likes, congresses and parliaments, presidents and prime ministers would not have stampeded into the ethanol swamp.

Lester Brown, for years the head of Washington’s World Watch Institute, has seen his error. Writing in the Washington Post two Sundays ago, he and co-author Jonathan Lewis, identified as a climate specialist, say the ethanol he championed for years has failed its promise. It harms the environment and deepens the “global food crisis.”

But as Alberta Deputy Premier Ron Stevens and Gary Mar, Alberta’s representative in Canada’s embassy in Washington, let it be known at a press conference on Tuesday, American environmentalists still see Alberta’s oil sands as satan.

Hunger they do not see. Morally smug and criminally silly, that’s my rating of the lot. For them, any substitute is better than oil. If that means putting food into fuel tanks, so be it. And the hungry? Why, let them eat grass and drink ethanol.

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Bogdan Kipling is a Canadian journalist in Washington.