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And that is the case with the discussion linking the prospect of world famine to the increasing importance of biofuels.
In my estimation, blame for the crisis of rising food prices and widespread malnutrition among the world’s poorest people is largely misplaced.
Please understand, I’m not in favor of global hunger. But I do object to efforts to make the American farmer a fall guy for the problem. That simply does deliberate disservice to the facts.
The argument is that the diversion of a portion of traditional food crops, mainly corn, to the production of motor vehicle fuel not only has hiked the grocery bill for families in this country. It also is said to threaten some of the planet’s most fragile societies with starvation, with a likely result of violent political upheaval.
Increasingly there is pressure, here and in Europe, to reverse, slow or halt the move to biofuels. And since the U.S. is the world’s largest food factory, and the American farmer is the most productive, he’s the one on which the brunt of the criticism falls.
That is patently unfair.
Yes, processing corn to run engines instead of filling stomachs does impact supply — but only fractionally. The other factors that come into play are, in every case, more important.
One is the problem of runaway population growth in many of the most impoverished countries. Those exploding numbers alone would guarantee world hunger under almost any circumstances.
Two, many of those countries are in climatically inhospitable regions — parts of the world where, by any reckoning, human survival is precarious. And with the changes in global weather patterns, such regions are expanding.
Perhaps most important of all, in some of the afflicted nations, internal conflict and malicious misrule are directly responsible for the suffering.
Examples:
The former Belgian Congo, Zaire, is a country with almost unimaginable natural wealth — gold, uranium, forest resources, hydroelectric potential. But it has spent virtually all its more than 40 years of independence in vicious civil wars.
Nigeria, where the rains do not fail, could, if reasonably governed, have been well fed and oil rich. Instead, it is by most measures both a political and an economic failure.
Before Robert Mugabe destroyed what once was a thriving agricultural sector by distributing productive farms to his political cronies, Zimbabwe was a major food exporter. Now starvation stalks the land.
And not in Africa alone but over much of the Third World, there is a population shift from the countryside to the overcrowded cities, by people hoping to grasp a share of the development that mostly does not exist.
These are some of the hard and unpalatable truths.
When there was a glut of food in the world and crop prices fell precipitously, the American farmer was barely able to cover his planting costs and lived in fear of losing his livelihood and his land.
But the biofuel industry’s entry into the grain market has pushed prices higher. And it is argued that a brake should be put on ethanol production, cutting demand and thus lowering the price of corn.
In other words, the farmer should be asked to share the pain again by taking less for his crop.
Excuse me, but I beg to differ.
The world economy is shaped by a combination of national policy choices. It has been estimated that the eventual cost of the Iraq war will total as much as $3 trillion to $4 trillion, which comes to roughly $530 for every soul on earth.
Except for the misguided rush to war and occupation by our country’s current leaders, that kind of money could have fed a lot of hungry mouths.
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