Ethanol boom could worsen world hunger: study

[babylonsister]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070403/sc_afp/usenergyfoodeconomy_070403185953

Ethanol boom could worsen world hunger: study

Tue Apr 3, 2:59 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The boom in ethanol fuels in the United States and elsewhere could have devastating effects on food prices and worsen world hunger, a new study argues.

The study by C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer of the University of Minnesota said the rush into ethanol threatens to divert massive amounts of corn and other food crops into biofuels.

The researcher write in the May/June edition of Foreign Affairs that governments should stop incentives for ethanol until biofuels can be economically produced from sources other than corn and soybeans.

"Resorting to biofuels is likely to exacerbate world hunger," they said. "Several studies by economists at the World Bank and elsewhere suggest that caloric consumption among the world's poor declines by about half of one percent whenever the average prices of all major food staples increase by one percent."

The researchers said the surge in energy prices along with subsidies and incentives given by governments has pushed farmers into diverting massive amounts of corn, oilseeds and other crops into ethanol.

In the US, this affects corn, but in Brazil it involves sugar cane and in Africa cassava.

more...

[Sapphire Blue]

1. K&R ; perhaps someday filling an empty stomach might be a higher priority than filling...

... a damn fuel tank. Perhaps, someday, the privileged of the world will care.

:kick:

[SidDithers]

2. In a competition for resources, between rich drivers...

and poor, starving inhabitants of the third world, who do you think will win?

Sid

[lectrobyte]

3. The rich drivers will win, at least until China, Japan etc. take the credit card away.

And then we'll be something like the former USSR...

[MrPrax]

4. Why the big moral push...

for this cash crop?

"Resorting to biofuels is likely to exacerbate world hunger,"

As opposed to what? 60% of all flowers sold in the US come fresh daily on jet planes from Colombia which was a US UN-sanction program to wean Colombia farmers off of coca -- another cash crop? Start there and while they are add it, shutdown the bulk of these worthless agricultural exports that actually cost MORE to transport than it does it manufacture.

I really don't get how it is that this is worst than all the bananas and iceberg lettuce production -- not to mention all the water that is regularly diverted from farming for mining...

If all this soul-searching leads to us white folks to reconsider the whole world food supply and actual causes of world hunger/global warming/imperial trade arrangements then great -- but it does seem a little laughable and obscene that people are so concerned all of a sudden over unjust food distribution.

It's a little late for the crocodile tears and it's a quite offensively hypocritical --