Is America Headed for a Food Shortage?

It seems clear that making ethanol fuel out of foodstuffs is a bad idea. Ethanol from waste biomass is another story.

Is America Headed for a Food Shortage?
A new study suggests that ethanol production could drive up corn prices, leaving U.S. grains and meat in short supply

By Dawn Stover | June 2007

Excerpts:

Ethanol is a renewable, homegrown fuel that can help lower U.S. dependence on foreign oil. But as more and more ethanol is made from corn, less and less corn is available for food production, and that’s causing some unforeseen problems.

Corn is a mainstay of American agriculture— it’s an important ingredient in cereals and baked goods, and corn syrup is used to make processed foods like candy, chips and soft drinks. But most importantly, corn is the major source of food for cattle, pigs, turkeys and chickens that are headed for the dinner table.... A recent study conducted by the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State University (which receives funding from grocery manufacturers and livestock producers) reported that U.S. ethanol production could consume more than half of U.S. corn, wheat and coarse grains by 2012, driving up food prices and causing shortages. The study estimates that booming ethanol production has already raised U.S. food prices by $47 per person annually. In Mexico, protests have already erupted over the high price of corn tortillas, a staple food in the local diet.

>snip

Planting more corn is one solution, but that means planting less of other crops that are also widely used in foods, such as soybeans and wheat. Tilling fallow land could create more growing space for corn, but might lead to soil erosion and impacts on wildlife habitats. According to a December 2006 study by the International Food Policy Research Institute, producing enough ethanol to fuel all of the world’s vehicles would require five times more corn than is planted today and 15 times as much sugar cane.

A more promising solution is to make ethanol from cellulose instead of starches and sugars—using plants such as switchgrass and organic waste instead of corn and sugarcane. This would also reduce greenhouse gas emissions much more effectively than making ethanol from corn.

Entire Article:
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/f1a136eb64603110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

TC

.... but I get your point, too! :hi:

there will be enough grain to go around.

although I also agree we need to reconsider most cities' public transportation abilities, personal consumption, and alternative fuels as well.

But I've noticed that few ever address the fact that livestock not only uses far more food than it produces, but that our current obsessive-level addiction to meat and the meat industry's use of high-yield factory farming is a huge contributor to greenhouse gases as well.

That doesn't sound like meat -- it sounds like Kool-Aid. Most people like meat because it's nutritious and it tastes good; some eat out of habit, like those whose normal lunch and/or dinner comes from a burger joint. That's way too common for our own collective good, but not everybody does it. If you do not eat meat for whatever reason, that's fine, but those who do not share your preferences are not diseased.

If people must forgo meat, they will have to eat more grain, beans, etc. to get protein. This is happening already in Europe and the USA, and is one of the forces behind obesity. Eating a lot of carbohydrate-based food increases the average level of insulin in the body. Combined with sedentary habits, high stress, and pseudohormone pollution (e.g., PFOA), this dietary hyperinsulinism leads to a kind of paradoxical malnutrition. You get to a point where not only are you not able to assimilate what you eat, but what you can assimilate makes you sick. Some people have found than eating no meat at all helps stop that process, but many others have found that eating less or no grain-based does the trick. My own health, for example, is best when I eat no starchy or sugary food at all -- not low-carb but NO carb. And a lot of green vegetables. This also has not led to me ODing on meat.

The point is that our world is entirely "out of balance". The only reason why meat production is so wasteful is because the factory model was applied to it first. Vegetable food production is rapidly catching up. This is its own crisis and is largely independent of eating habits. And it also leads us to see a number of other crises in the making: the complete botching-up of biofuels, the rapid loss of fertile soil, ever-increasing pesticide loading, petrochemical soil amendment, and the hasty adoption of GMOs before we understand how they work.

Small-scale, diversified, niche-aware, preferably organic farming is what we need to promote -- and quickly. And fixing some of the gross "imbalances" in the way our society is organized will also help, though I wouldn't hold my breath. People have a natural instinct to adjust their food intake and variety according to how they feel, and encouraging this kind of awareness would go a long way, too. It is quite likely overall meat consumption will decrease, and no philosophy will be required to do it. But the way things are going now, the entire world could give up meat, and we'd be in the same predicament within a few months. We may not require a Khmer Rouge style revolution, but piecewise changes are likely to be a waste of time and, ultimately, more resources.

--p!

maybe I should have said "addicted." People don't need to eat 3 servings of bacon on every meal, or even 3 or 4 servings of meat in one sitting.

As to this:

I call BS. First of all, I know far more obese "carnivores" (the folks who refuse to eat any vegetable) than I do fat vegetarians and even fewer fat vegans, not to mention the other health issues involved in the 'no fiber' diet. Also, Americans and Europeans eat far more, not less, meat than they used to, and obesity is up.

Furthermore, to produce a pound of meat requires several pounds of grains and hundreds of gallons of water. The grains estimate varies depending on who you believe - the meat industry says 2.6 pounds (which I don't believe) and the vegetarian groups claim 10 to 20 pounds, which also may be exaggerated. Either way, you are producing far more food for the cattle when you could just use the water and the grains and vegetables grown on that same land for people.

I won't even go into the literally thousands of pounds of cow manure produced every week in the US from >100 head feedlot beef production alone, or the hog industry's complete ruining of the water in the southeast.

I realize that different people require different things, and I am not even suggesting a no meat diet so much as a rational level of consumption of anything.

As a culture, we are addicted to it because we've been sold a high-meat diet by an industry that expects exponential growth, and that is one of the reasons meat production is not discussed as a global climate change issue, despite that industry creating more greenhouse gases than vehicles do.

Sadly, the problems you mention in vegetable production are true, but they also apply to the grains and soy which is grown for feedlots.

The ideal of sprawling suburbs has bitten us in the ass. We need to think our idea of The American Dream and start building small cities and real towns again, places where a car isn't mandatory.

Then, we can redesign personal transport around lighter, highly-efficient vehicles.

40 MPG is nothing. We should demand 300 MPG from these new vehicles. And live in human-scale towns where you can get to know people and walk to where you need to get to.

--p!

the interior, some form of personal transportation is necessary and we all aren't well enough to bike long distances. Besides, pedal power won't work on the farm. Rail will work out here for long distances, but intermediate distances are a big problem.

Unless we're willing to traverse streets full of horse poo again (THINK of the ammonia!), you and I and everyone else will have to start to think about what we're going to use to power our vehicles.

Compressed air? Batteries? Solar power fueling the electrolysis we need to power fuel cell cars? Biomass methane? Squirrels?

My own interim solution is an electric moped for short hops when I don't have to haul too much. As even battery production becomes problematic and recharging power intermittent, that could be problematic, also. I also got a Korean clown car for longer hops.

This is going to be more and more of a challenge down the road, and $3.50/gallon but plentiful gasoline will eventually be seen as the good old days.

Ideally, most people would live in towns and small cities, and have public transport for the long haul. Water transport could also be re-developed, especially along the coasts and on the Mississippi. The redesigned personal transport I have in mind would be an ultralight car the equivalent of your moped or "clown car" -- only better-engineered and cheaper. There is no reason why we couldn't develop a new generation of better cars about the size we have now, either. We could have vehicles for every niche and need instead of vehicles for every whim. When energy becomes expensive, we will have to satisfy our whims through other means -- like sex, music, or perhaps open-source software development. :)

I expect that the world will change drastically in the next 50 years; even in the next 20. But I don't suggest we become survivalists. After the first years of shock and grief, there will be a movement of innovation and rebuilding. We won't just develop new technologies, we will develop new ways of doing things altogether. Rebuilding may not take place overnight, but it need not happen at a snail's pace.

Not that it won't be a rough ride at times. I expect there will be some serious pain and suffering. But we ought to not give in to despair under any circumstances.

--p!

unrealistic. Here in the wild west, it takes a lot of land to support sheep and cattle, which are about all that grow well in the arid scrubland. Ranches are many miles apart, and towns many miles distant, still. Farms need to be tended, and it's beyond unrealistic to expect a farmer to bike sixty miles each way to his fields, and that is a middlin' distance in much of the country west of the Mississippi. He's going to be a lot more efficient living on his land, not in some town that is more efficient for retailers and other workers.

You might be able to kill the car culture in the urban corridors on both coasts, but flyover country is going to need far different solutions.

Our community-building problems aren't coming from the people on the prairie and open range, and it's not from supporting the people employed in agriculture and animal husbandry -- it's from spreading out the entire population and everyone depending on the automobile. The resource demands are enormous and the benefits are minimal.

I'm not calling for a one-size-fits-all approach. Suburbanization has been a poor solution to urban congestion. As long as petroleum was cheap, it was workable in affluent nations, but those days will soon be coming to an end. The best "solution" in my view is to build a new generation of towns and small cities instead of sprawling subdivisions. It will preserve a great deal of wilderness, keep urban tenement ghettos from re-developing on the scale they reached before WWI, allow greater energy efficiency and reduce environmental impact.

But for everybody? No. Just for those who would be suburb-dwellers in an earlier era. The working scale of life in flyover country will probably not change much. The technology might, and the economic arrangements ought to. The farmer's pick-up truck of 2050 might be built of carbon nanotube composite material and powered by hydrogen or some exotic liquid fuel, but it will probably be a lot like 1950's model.

"(F)lyover country is going to need far different solutions". That's exactly right. There will be hundreds of niches that will need to adapt. But there will have to be a solution for the big suburban niche, and it will probably have to be solved early on. The town/small city model is the possibility I favor.

--p!

Was that a typo, or did you really mean three hundred miles per gallon? How would that be accomplished?

A very light vehicle with a very efficient hybrid motor could achieve 300 MPG. It may be easier said than done -- of course! But if a 5000 pound automobile can achieve 40 MPG or more, a well-engineered 500 pound ultralight "smart car" ought to be able to hit about 300.

This is in the ballpark of what we ought te be aiming for, anyway. And if we can get 400 MPG, so much the better.

--p!

As far as I know, there is no 5000 pound car that is capable of getting that kind of mileage. I'd love to hear about it if you're aware of one, though.

For example, the Prius weighs about 2900, but that's due to the very heavy battery pack. A new Honda Civic weighs somewhere around 2200, and the current object of my desire, a Honda Fit, comes in around 2300.

I know some wealthy people up North from where I live that built a mansion on a large piece of land, and since 1999 they've gotten more than $75,000 not to grow corn (not that they ever would have).

Here's the farm subsidy database

http://www.ewg.org/farm/index.php?key=nosign

My state alone has given $1,582,096,541 in corn subsidies since 1995.

I think the answer to this problem is clear

nt

drought hitting clear up into southern Minnesota we are looking at much higher food prices this year already. One good thing may come of this though: it may revise the old Rodale idea of surveying each state to determine if they grow enough food for their own citizens. If that happens then we may be able to do something about that. As for me and my family we planted our victory gardens (mine in pots on the back patio) this weekend and we bought a lot of fruit jars at the rummage sales. Every year we do more to make ourselves food independent.

Hey, but that's a GOOD thing, right?? More profits for food producers is a great idea.

The Little People, of course, will have to get by on cake.

so I think we are already on the precipice of a food shortage and just don't know it.

The Democrats need to take the WH and a veto-proof majority in Congress in 2008. We have a lot of work to do.

Enough of this procedural dance. Time is money. America is circling the drain.

Excerpt:

"The chief culprit is corn, namely No. 2 feed corn, the staple of the breadbasket. In answer to President Bush's call for greater oil independence, the amount of feed corn distilled into ethanol is expected to double in the next five to six years. Distillation is already sucking up 18 percent of the total crop. The ethanol gambit, in turn, is sending corn prices to historic levels – topping $4 per bushel earlier this year, and remaining high. All of this trickles down to the boards at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, affecting the price of everything from sirloin to eggs (which are up, by the way, 18.6 percent across the nation)."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0613/p01s01-usec.html?s=u1

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1098956


TC

<snip>ROMANS: Thank you so much. America has fallen in love with ethanol, an energy source from corn; it is used as widely believed to be a win- win-win situation. That is it's good for farmer, it is good for the environment, and it's a good quick fix to our oil problem.

But now we're starting to see some of the unintended consequences. Consider this. It takes 450 pounds of corn to fill up a 25-gallon gas tank in an SUV. That same amount of corn provides enough calories to feed one person for a year. Ethanol's popularity is now pushing up food prices. Ben Senauer is going to tell us more about that. He is the professor of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota and co-director of the Food Industry Center there. Welcome to the program.

BENJAMIN SENAUER, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA: Well, thank you very much. It's my pleasure to be here.

ROMANS: First, what are some of the unintended consequences of this love affair with corn, with ethanol, as an alternative to oil?

SENAUER: Well, we're just beginning to realize some of the implications of having linked food prices to oil prices. Right now a bushel of corn sells for $3.70. If oil went to $80 a barrel, ethanol producers could pay $5 a bushel for corn.

ROMANS: And that will mean higher prices for the food we eat?

SENAUER: Yes, it is, because corn is at the very center of the entire U.S. Food and Agriculture system. It's our largest crop; it's our largest agricultural export. We are the largest exporter of corn in the world. It is the key feed ingredient for cattle, pigs, poultry, and dairy cows.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0706/10/cnnitm.01.html


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1098507


TC

... Our FDA watchdogs are on top of things, using our tax dollars to protect us. Oh, wait. </sarcasm>