The current food crisis cannot be blamed on third world governments, as was the case in most earlier famines. This crisis in caused by a sudden spike in the price of rice, grain and other staples. See also this article: http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...
Moving from growing food to growing biofuels is necessarily going to influence the price of food - basically the prices of oil and of food staples are going to move in tandem. And we should be very careful before we commit one fifth of arable land to biofuels.
Ultimately this food crisis is caused by poverty, and there's no easy cure for that.
That is simply not true! See Zimbabwe. Not long ago they were a huge exporter of food, the "breadbasket of Africa" everyone called them. Now look at them. Mugabe has brought them to ruin.
Sure, Zimbabwe is a total disaster, but the current food crisis is world-wide: in Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Haiti, the Philippines, Egypt. etc. The price of rice has almost tripled in less than two years.
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cf...
Re:The Hydrogen Hoax
by richcollins on Monday July 28, 2008 @01:54AM
(#258819)
Not debasing the currency is a start.
The vast majority of corn grown in the US is for cattle feed. And if we're talking about energy efficiency, that's pretty much as bad as it can get. Not to mention that if we worry about feeding the planet, we should immediately stop growing cattle, except possibly where they can graze on land too marginal for agriculture. Growing a heavily fossil-fuel based crop like corn to feed cattle only makes sense because a) most of the costs of the fossil fuel are externalized, and b) no one actually cares about how many people we can feed, because the people that can pay want beef.
I think that the concerns about feeding the starving people in impoverished countries should be better-directed at their governments. In many cases, food supplied as aid by the U.S. and U.N. is either rejected outright due to political bias, sold on the open market to produce money for corrupt officials, or left to rot in warehouses due to the local government not doing anything to put infrastructure in place to move 'the food' to 'the starving people'.
I'm not an advocate for biofuels, but making the argument that biofuel production is a direct cause of world starvation is more than a little far-fetched; the causes are complex, and more political than technological in origin, much like the failings of the nuclear power industry in the States.
Also don't ignore that, in the U.S., a great deal of arable land goes to waste because of government farm subsidies and other political buggery.
For the sake of playing with some numbers, let's assume that a reasonably efficient car, powered by ethanol, would require ten gallons of fuel per week, or around five hundred gallons per year. That's two acres per car, per year. There are approximately sixty million registered cars in the U.S., requiring a hundred and twenty million acres of farmland be dedicated to producing fuel for these cars, and this is only if the cars ran solely on ethanol.
So, if every car in the US were to run on Ethanol, it would consume one-fifth of the total agricultural production capacity.
Also note that some quick Googling for me shows that yields might be almost double the 250 gallons/acre number for biofuels.
This doesn't mean that biofuels are the ideal solution, but they are certainly a strong contender.
Actually, I may have just become a biofuel advocate. The technology to build flex-fuel cars exists now, and can take advantage of the existing transportation infrastructure until such time as a better means, be it hydrogen, super-capacitors, or dilithium crystals, is available. Doing so would reduce dependence on foreign oil, help boost the national economy, and would likely have the positive side effect of promoting research into increasing long-term, sustainable, high crop yields.