A hundred years ago, if you made corn liquor, revenuers (the feds) would chase you into the deepest hillbilly hideouts of the Smokies to put you out of business.
These days, they’ll not only ensure you’re paid well for your efforts, they’ll give you a tax break to boot. Why? Because Americans get warm and fuzzy thinking our cars will produce less carbon dioxide if we just add a little ethanol to our fossil fuels. And if we produce less carbon dioxide, we can slow global warming. That’s a good thing, right?
Well, to start with, our global warming fetish has driven up the price of the staple food of Mexico’s poor. According to the Chicago Tribune: “For low-income Mexicans, who earn about $18 a day on average, the increasing prices have hit hard. According to the government, about half of the country’s 107 million citizens live in poverty. ‘When there isn’t enough money to buy meat, you do without,’ said Bonifacia Ysidro, but ‘you can’t do without’ tortillas.”
Here’s the Sacramento Bee, citing the Agriculture Department: “Ethanol plants and foreign buyers are gobbling the nation’s corn supplies, pushing prices as high as $3.40 a bushel.”
Why are they gobbling up corn supplies? Ethanol mandates — that is, Congress’s attempt to ween America from its oil “addiction” with maize-based methadone — are to blame. The effect on Mexican poor people is just one of the adverse consequences of this U.S. corn subsidy-by-fiat.
Listen closely. Can you hear the response? As the use of ethanol becomes more widespread, we can use other forms of agriculture, such as switchgrass, sugar and wood. The price of corn will go down as the industry diversifies. Fine. But this latest bit of environmental fetishism will take its toll in other ways. In fact, it already has.
The widespread use and subsidy of ethanol in Brazil may have already caused untold damage to Amazonia, as sugarcane crops have supplanted the jungle like an invasive species. The irony? Emerald forests — once a stark symbol of the environmental movement — are now being depleted for the sake of a green fixation perpetuated here at home by the very same movement.
But it’s not just happening in Brazil. Since all this environmental awareness feeds perfectly into the entrenched corporate welfare of the congressional farm bill, unholy alliances between green groups and farm lobbies have emerged.
Organizations like Environmental Defense have teamed up with corn growers and other special interests to save the world. All the while, they overlook the damage wrought both at home and abroad: “Even without ethanol, the world is facing a clash between food and forests,” writes Dennis Avery, an expert for the Center for Global Food Issues. “Food and feed demands on farmlands will more than double by 2050. Unfortunately, the American public does not yet understand the massive land requirements of U.S. corn ethanol, nor the unique conditions that have allowed sugar cane ethanol to make a modest energy contribution in Brazil. The United States might have to clear an additional 50 million acres of forest — or more — to produce economically significant amounts of liquid transport fuels.”
So much for tree-hugging. Environmental activists would have us clear-cut U.S. forestland (which, to layer the irony, is supposed to help sequester carbon dioxide) for the sake of unsettled science and global warming alarmism. Believe it or not, the Bush administration supports all of this, despite what strange bedfellows all these interested parties have made.
Are we doing our part? The next time you get the warm-n-fuzzies as you drive out of your way to a station that allows you to fill your car with E85-ready gas, think about the fact that you’re helping strip the world of its trees, that you’re contributing to the plight of the poor in Mexico, that you’re supporting anticompetitive agriculture subsidies that are hurting the world’s poor generally, and that this ethanol fixation has a miniscule effect on climate abatement.
In short, the issue is far more complicated that anyone realizes, especially Congress. Let’s keep bureaucrats — and our own warm-n-fuzzies — out of global markets.
Max Borders is an adjunct scholar for the National Center for Policy Analysis.
