The price of such staples as wheat, corn, and rice has been rising dramatically for some time now. At least part of the increase in price has been blamed on the production of biofuel, seen by many as an eco-friendly alternative energy source whose use diminishes the emission of greenhouse gases and so helps prevent global warming, or as it is more commonly called nowadays, climate change.
As a 6 December 2007 article in the Economist tells us:
“This year biofuels will take a third of America's (record )maize harvest. That affects food markets directly: fill up an SUV's fuel tank with ethanol and you have used enough maize to feed a person for a year. And it affects them indirectly, as farmers switch to maize from other crops. The 30m tonnes of extra maize going to ethanol this year amounts to half the fall in the world's overall grain stocks.” 1
A poster on forums.cnet has worked out the math to his own satisfaction thus:
“I decided to try to work out the ‘The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol, for instance, could feed one person for a year.’ statement. I think I figured out how he did it. Most of the nutritional sites I looked at used 2,000 calories as a figure of 1 day's calorie requirements, so let's use that as a base. Yellow corn meal is 110 calories in 30 grams. That would make 545 grams for one day's calories. Times 365 days in a year = 198,925 grams for a year. 454 grams in a pound makes that 438 pounds....Coming up with yield in a corn mash was not easy but I found one moonshine reference that said it was 1.5 gallons yield per 28 lb. bushel. The 438 pounds above would be 15.6 bushels. Times 1.5 gallons per bushel makes about 23.4 gallons total. That's damned close to the 25 gallons for a SUV tank, so I think that that's his logic.” 2
A 27 October 2007 Associated Press article cites a U.N. expert who “called the growing practice of converting food crops into biofuel ‘a crime against humanity,’ saying it is creating food shortages and price jumps that cause millions of poor people to go hungry.
Jean Ziegler, who has been the United Nations' independent expert on the right to food since the position was established in 2000, called for a five-year moratorium on biofuel production to halt what he called agrowing ‘catastrophe’ for the poor....” 3
And in a more recent, 12 April 2008 Globe and Mail article, we have:
“Fatal food riots in Haiti. Violent food-price protests in Egypt and Ivory Coast. Rice so valuable it is transported in armoured convoys. Soldiers guarding fields and warehouses. Export bans to keep local populations from starving.
"For the first time in decades, the spectre of widespread hunger for millions looms as food prices explode. Two words not in common currency in recent years — famine and starvation — are now being raised as distinct possibilities in the poorest, food-importing countries....
"The dramatic price rises have been driven by factors absent in previous food shortages.
"They include turning food into fuel...Driven by fears of global warming, biofuel has become big business in the U.S., Canada and the European Union. The incentive to produce the fuels is overwhelming because they are subsidized by taxpayers and, depending on the country or the region, come with content mandates.” 4
How could an attempt to save the planet lead to the possibility of mass hunger and starvation? Perhaps Michael Crichton is on to something when he writes that “one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists....If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
“There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment.” 5
The overwhelming desire of energy sinners to put themselves into an ecological state of grace might explain their shortsightedness as regards the effects of their rush to the salvation of sustainability.
On the other hand, there is an ecological school of thought that sees depopulation as a positive thing because it regards Man (as he exists today) as a disruptive force in Nature. Indeed, Dave Foreman, author of Confessions of an Eco-Warrior and founder of environmentalist movement EarthFirst, has articulated as one of that movement’s principles “a placing of Earth first in all decisions, even ahead of human welfare if necessary.” Foreman feels that “an individual human life has no more intrinsic value than does an individual Grizzly Bear life.”
One of Foreman’s principles is “a recognition that there are far too many human beings on Earth…[I]n our decimation of biological diversity, in our production of toxins, in our attack on the basic life-support system of Earth, in our explosive population growth, we humans have become a disease—the Humanpox” which “has metastasized from a simple, uncomfortable, localized skin rash to a systemic life threat.”
Certainly, mass starvation in the poorer countries would reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that environmentalists feel are destroying the planet. And the idea of depopulation as a means of ushering in a new Eden is a recurrent theme in history: from the Jacobins’ attempt to depopulate France through mass executions, to the attempt by Stalin to depopulate the Soviet Union through the creation of artificial famine, to the attempt of Pol Pot to depopulate Cambodia though mass executions.
It remains to be seen how much of the world food crisis has been caused by the conversion of food crops into car fuel. But at the very least, this diversion of food to fuel has exacerbated the crisis. And it is certainly ironic that a West obsessed with universal egalitarianism should have put, through its efforts to make the world a better place to live in, so many millions at risk.
Also ironic is the fact that the more he accumulates scientific knowledge, the more Man sees himself as center of the universe. He sees his existence of such consequence that he ascribes to his actions the cyclical variations in the temperature of the earth and other natural phenomena. This attitude can perhaps be put down to the vanity that is part of the human condition, a vanity that also manifests itself in the desire to take charge of human evolution.
In his Henry IV, Part l, Shakespeare ridiculed Man’s tendency to self-aggrandizement:
GLENDOWER [A]t my nativity
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,
Of burning cressets; and at my birth
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shaked like a coward.
HOTSPUR Why, so it would have done at the same season, if your mother's cat had but kittened, though yourself had never been born....
Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions; oft the teeming earth
Is with a kind of colic pinch'd and vex'd
By the imprisoning of unruly wind
Within her womb; which, for enlargement striving,
Shakes the old beldam earth and topples down
Steeples and moss-grown towers. At your birth
Our grandam earth, having this distemperature,
In passion shook.
Shakespeare’s poetic description of earthquakes is in line with that of Mark Buchanan (in Ubiquity), who writes: “[A]long the principal fault of the San Andreas, the plate to the west drifts northward, while the plate to the east moves southwards. If the rocks don’t slip at the boundary, then they bend, and develop internal stress. The more stress, the more likely slipping becomes. Earthquakes come from the buildup and release of stress.”
Of course, man-made disasters do exist, and it is as evident as it is incontrovertible that a sharp reduction in the production of food can lead to famine and mass death, especially in the poorer nations. The artificial famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930s—produced by Stalin in his attempt to take control of and speed up what he saw as the historical process, thereby ushering in a classless, egalitarian society—is documented by Robert Conquest in his Harvest of Sorrow.
Sources:
1.http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=7216688&story_id=10252015
2.http://forums.cnet.com/5208-7813_102-0.html?forumID=50&threadID=266801&messageID=2601236
3.http://www.livescience.com/environment/071027-ap-biofuel-crime.html
4.http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080410.wfood0411/BNStory/International/?&pageRequested=all&print=true
5.http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-environmentalismaseligion.html