Starve people, feed cars

I had forgotten about this issue. This is well put, so I will just quote it here, with the footnotes. Suffice it to say, starving human beings of food because governments mandate that productive farmland must be used to provide food that will be converted into fuel is evil. That fact that it massively increases pollutants, use of fossil fuels, and is an inefficient fuel that is bad for engines only makes it worse. Perfectly good food made into poor, polluting food for cars? Way to go governments. That is the good work we expect of you.

" 'It is a crime against humanity to convert agricultural productive soil into soil which produces food stuff that will be turned into Biofuels,' says Jean Ziegler, the U.N. special Rapporteur. [2]

Dr. Pimentel, Cornell professor and White House advisor, has warned every administration since Richard Nixon that ethanol and biofuels could not be a solution to the oil crisis because:
Over 140% more energy-mostly high value oil and natural gas, is expended to produce a gallon of corn ethanol than is in the ethanol itself. [3]

Since the advent of biofuels, the global emergency food grain reserves have shrunk from a marginal 120-day supply to a critical 57-day buffer in 2006 and now, according to some sources, a zero-day supply in 2009. [4]
When the emergency food grain reserve had a 57-day buffer, the poor in the Third World were, according to UN FAO and WHO statistics, starving to death at the rate of between 25,000 and 40,000 each day." [5]

Footnotes:

[1] 2010 Food Crisis for Dummies, Eric deCarbonnel, www.marketskeptics.com December 17, 2009
[2] Much of the current acceleration in that disparity, and the increasing third world hunger that results from it, is a direct bi-product of the ill-advised and misleadingly-promoted bio-fuel revolution in the industrialized world.
The price of corn jumped 85% since 2002 due to corn/ethanol inflation.
Several studies by economists at the World Bank and elsewhere suggest that the number of food-insecure people in the world rises by over 16 million for every percentage increase in the real prices of staple foods. That means, they suggest, that 1.2 billion people could be chronically hungry by 2025. But those numbers are extremely conservative. How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor, C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer, May/June 2007

[3] "Corn Ethanol Allure Plummets", Cornell University, Dr. David Pimentel produced his initial study as chairman of the Gasohol Study Group, a task force convened by the Reagan Administration in 1980 to investigate the efficiency of ethanol production. David Pimentel released a startling study for the United States Department of Energy showing that making ethanol consumes far more energy than the ethanol contains. The United States Department of Agriculture, food giant Archer-Daniel-Midlands and others in the corn lobby vilified him, and congressmen from corn states demanded that the federal government's watchdog, the General Accounting Office, thoroughly investigate his findings. The GAO spent 20 times as much money reviewing Dr. Pimentel's work as Dr. Pimentel's own team did in creating the original study. After dissecting his methodology and scrutinizing every figure, the GAO, too, endorsed Dr. Pimentel's study.
[4] World Grain Stocks Fall to 57 Days of Consumption: Grain Prices Starting to Rise Earth Policy Institute Lester Brown, Jun 15 2006,
Catastrophic Fall in 2009 Global Food Production Eric deCarbonnel, December 26, 2009. The May 1, 2008 CCC Inventory report may be reviewed here: http://www.fsa.usda.gov/Internet/FSA_File/wid2a.pdf.
**DEC. Alert** US to be CUT OFF from World - Baltic Dry Index Falls http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXATSV8S3-M
[5] Some statistics are truly alarming. More than 780 million people — 20% of the developing world — are chronically undernourished. About 190 million children under five years of age, including more than 150 million in Asia and 27 million in Africa, suffer from protein-energy malnutrition. Every day, 40 000 children under the age of five die, and malnutrition is a major contributing factor. Some 2000 million people in more than 100 developing countries suffer from micronutrient deficiencies that can lead to blind-ness, mental retardation, and even death. April 1994, Human health and nutrition: How isotopes are helping to overcome "hidden hunger", IAEA Nutritional and Health-Related Environmental Studies Section of the Division of Human Health, Robert M. Parr and Carla R. Fjeld
Where and Why Are 10 Million Children Dying Every Year? Black, Robert, Morris, Saul, & Jennifer Bryce. The Lancet 361:2226-2234. 2003.
Biofuels: The Five Myths of the Agro-fuels Transition, Eric Holt-Giménez, Food first Institute for Food and Development Policy

On The Road To Copenhagen and A Global Food Crisis
Politics / Food Crisis Jan 06, 2010 - 01:13 AM
By: Robert_Palmer