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So what if there's a global food crisis? John Baird, our Environment Minister, is sticking by his guns -- er, corn. The Chrysler minivan he drives is powered by fuel that's 85-per-cent ethanol. "My car is a great one," he says proudly, "and I am not planning on changing it."
In order to prove their greenness, politicians have stampeded to embrace biofuels. Biofuels are the main plank in Stephen Harper's environmental platform, and the Tories have pledged $1.5-billion in subsidies to stimulate production. Ontario's Liberal government is spending $520-million to make sure gasoline sold in the province contains lots of lovely ethanol -- 5 per cent today, with more to come. Dalton McGuinty, the Premier, says there are no plans to reconsider.
Only yesterday, biofuels were supposed to be the virtuous alternative to fossil fuels and the answer to energy self-sufficiency. But now, they've been fingered as a culprit in the global food crisis. As governments demand higher biofuel content, farmers around the world have switched from growing food to growing fuel. And that makes all food crops more expensive. Britain's chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, warns that the rush to biofuels is threatening world food production and the lives of billions. Britain's Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has called for a major re-evaluation. The head of the United Nations World Food Program cautions that the growing use of biofuels is driving up its operating costs and hurting its "capacity to respond to hunger."
The new alliance against biofuels is an unlikely mix of environmentalists, aid agencies, scientists and economists from all across the ideological spectrum. The numbers they cite are astonishing. This year, about 100 million tons of grain - enough to feed nearly 450 million people for a year - will be converted from food into fuel. Around 30 per cent of the U.S. corn crop now goes to fuel. But the environmental payoff from corn-based ethanol is small. Even with maximum production, by the year 2030 it will still meet only 6 per cent of the U.S. demand for transport fuel.
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Not everyone has cooled to biofuels. Farmers love them. So do agribusiness giants like Archer Daniels Midland, which are harvesting a bumper crop of profits from taxpayers' money. Government subsidies are so enormous they could amount to half or more of ethanol's cost of production. We're talking billions. Meantime, the UN food program has cut back food aid because its costs have gone up 40 per cent since last June.
The switch to biofuels could even speed up global warming. Many researchers argue that if the full environmental cost is factored in, almost all the biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels. Countries like Indonesia are razing forests to produce palm oil. And there's a domino effect. As more land is converted to biofuels in North America, agriculture to meet food demand expands in other parts of the world. "And that's done in a significant part by burning down forests and plowing up grasslands," says Princeton researcher Tim Searchinger. He figures that when you add in all the global effects, over a 30-year span biofuels will end up creating twice as much carbon dioxide as the same amount of gasoline would.
Biofuels aren't the only villain behind soaring food prices, of course. But they're a great example of the law of unintended consequences, which tends to work overtime whenever politicians try to come up with politically attractive, simplistic solutions to horrendously complex problems. I'm pretty sure that starving the poor, plowing the Amazon, and enriching agribusiness weren't exactly what John Baird, Dalton McGuinty and the European Union had in mind when they set out to save the planet and court the green vote. Time for a rethink, guys. This cure is worse than the disease.
