Say Anything Blog

Ed Schafer is on the front cover of the Washington Times today saying, in his roll as the US Sec. of Agriculture, that ethanol isn’t contributing to the global food problem:

I love Ed Schafer, but he’s flat-out wrong on this.

Food, like any other product, exists in a market and is susceptible to the forces of supply and demand.  By diverting food crops to energy production we’ve reduced the overall quantity of food crops available for human consumption and also reduced the amount of land available to produce food.

Now, we can argue about fuel crops coming from lands that weren’t used for food crops previously and about other things such as weather impact the global food market, but the simple truth is that diverting food crops to fuel production has a significant impact on the global food market.  Even if you could argue that the crops used for fuel were all new crops not taken away from existing food supplies so that the market impact was neutral (and I’m not convinced that such an argument can be made) the fact remains that fuel crops are taking up more land that could have been used to expand production to meet supply shortages.

For faithful supports of ethanol to deny this is for them to deny reality itself.

I think it would do the biofuel industry well to admit that, long term, trying to meet rising energy demand by converting the food we eat to fuel is a boondoggle and that future biofuel efforts should be focused on using raw materials that aren’t food.