Sinfully Crude
Whose mother never cautioned her child that to waste food was a sin? That respect for food, that appreciation for its life-affirming presence in lives that knew the desperation of food shortages, was handed down at the dinner table from parent to child for an awfully long time.And of course there was also that concomitant soul-shriveling censure delivered from parents' aggrieved mouths when children refused to eat healthy foods at odds with their taste buds, in the form of the demand that their children "think of all the starving children in Africa!".
Well, thanks to criminally irresponsible African regimes with their cruelly totalitarian administrations, there are still children starving in Africa. While at the same time, thanks to scientific innovations to agriculture and the "green revolution" there are yet a good many African children eating better now than ever they were able to.
Although, come to think of it, African children too have been conscripted into slavish devotion to nutrient-deficient quasi-food produced by huge corporations dedicated to the bottom line.
But that's another story. This one is about the growing food shortage in the world today.
While more crops are being grown, successfully, the world store of food is being starkly diminished. There is a definite and growing shortage of food in a world where demand is steadily increasing. And the reason - one of the identified reasons - is that food is being wasted, diverted for use as energy, fuel to run machinery and vehicles.
Could anything be more ill conceived? To divert food production from feeding people, to feeding their machinery.
At this initial stage of ethanol production, the United States is currently using more corn for that purpose, than Canada's entire corn crop. World production of ethanol is clambering upward at a staggering rate, from 20 billion litres in 2000 to 60 billion in 2007.
In the U.S., ethanol plants are frantically under construction; figures projected for 2008 predict 52 billion litres of ethanol being produced in the U.S. alone, and when all the new plants come on stream the increase will be mind-boggling.
That is food being diverted from some peoples' mouths to other peoples' vehicles. Corn is beginning to outstrip the agricultural output of wheat, barley, soybeans, canola - because of demand. And because growing corn is more generously remunerative.
Farmers are beginning to grow less of what people put in their mouths, and because of the high return on corn, turning to planting corn. The additional mind-boggling complication is that corn by-products are a staple in a whole lot of the processed food we eat. Not to speak of corn used to feed livestock and chickens, for example.
With corn being diverted at such a rate for ethanol, and what's left over being used for traditional purposes at ever-increasing costs, food of all kinds becomes more expensive. As the price of corn rises, so does the cost of other finished products using corn, including all manner of processed foods and supermarket-purchased chicken and beef and pork.
Global food supplies are diminishing. How's this for a horror story: The amount of corn it takes to produce 75 litres of ethanol, which represents a tank of fuel, is enough corn to feed one person on a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet for a year.
Think that's a good exchange?
Labels: Environment, Technology, Troublespots
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, February 17, 2008
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