Ethenol leaves bad aftertaste as biofuel

By Stan Freeman

05/06/2008- The Republican

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, ethanol may be powering cars traveling that highway.

Touted a year ago as the way out of the global energy crisis, the biofuel, derived mainly from corn at the moment, is now being blamed as a cause of the global food crisis.

In recent weeks, riots broke out in Haiti, Egypt, Bangladesh and Yemen over food shortages and high prices.
 
"Ethanol from corn is surely accounting for some of the food shortages," said Fergus M. Clydesdale, Food Science Department head at University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

"Obviously, you can make a lot of money right now growing corn for ethanol. So there's more land in corn and less land in things like soy, and that means the price for soy goes up," he said.

"Until they can make ethanol from materials that are either garbage or that grow on marginal land, it's not going to make a lot of sense," he said.

Ethanol was once as "green" as a field of growing corn. There was much praise last year when the U.S. government mandated ethanol production be ramped up to 36 billion gallons annually by 2022, more than a five-fold increase, to reduce the nation's dependency on foreign oil.

However, primarily as a result of growing ethanol production, corn prices rose 60 percent from 2005 to 2007, and with added government subsidies, farmers in the United States and elsewhere rushed to plant corn for ethanol, sometimes in place of less profitable food crops.

Between March 2007 and March 2008, prices worldwide for six key food groups, including meat, dairy and cereals, rose 57 percent, according to the United Nations.

Many saw the rises in ethanol production and food prices as cause and effect.

Ethanol can be made from almost any plant matter, but now is most efficiently and least expensively made from corn. Many plants, such as prairie grass and trees, have tough cell walls that have to be broken down before the starches inside can be harvested to make the biofuel, and good methods to do that haven't been developed yet.

UMass microbiologist Susan B. Leschine is among the scientists searching for one.

"A lot of people are working to find a way to convert nonfood sources into biofuels. It's just a matter of time until a method becomes commercially available," she said.

However, Leschine believes ethanol is not the primary reason food prices have soared. "It's a complicated issue. So much of the cost of food is due to things like transportation and packaging, and that all relies on oil. To me, oil is the major driver in this."

Farming uses a lot of energy, much of it derived from oil, so record high oil prices have also raised the cost of food.

In addition, she said, a drought in Australia, commodity speculators driving up prices and more meat being eaten in developing countries - about half of U.S. corn becomes animal feed - have been factors in the rise of prices.

Ethanol's reputation as more environmentally friendly than gasoline is also crumbling. Recent studies in the journal Science found converting rain forests, grassland and savanna to grow biofuel crops will increase greenhouse gas emissions for decades, mainly because these nonagricultural lands absorb vast amounts of carbon dioxide, a primary greenhouse gas.

The findings are one more reason to reconsider the commitment to ethanol, said Sandra L. Postel, director of the Center for the Environment at Mount Holyoke College.

"We're helping to push poor people around the world into hunger," Postel said.

While she acknowledges there are many factors behind the sharp rise in global food prices, "The one piece of this that the United States itself can do the most about is ethanol. We've been heavily subsidizing the farmers who grow corn, encouraging the expansion of corn production with the intent of trying to replace some of our oil dependency."

Postel believes the United States must cut back its ethanol subsidies and production mandate. "They just don't make sense right now."

Congress may be listening. Last week, Senate Republicans wrote to the Environmental Protection Agency suggesting it halt plans to expand ethanol production due to the global food crisis.

That message was also delivered to European lawmakers yesterday by economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and a special adviser to the United Nations.

Biofuel production targets "do not make sense now in a global food scarcity condition," Sachs told reporters before he spoke to the European Parliament yesterday.

Top international food scientists last month recommended use of food-based biofuels, such as ethanol, be halted, saying that would cut corn prices by 20 percent during a world food crisis.

European Commission spokesman Michael Mann said biofuel use in Europe is not a significant factor in pushing up food prices. More important are poor harvests, growing Asian demand and export restrictions, he said.

But Sachs insisted biofuels in Europe hit the food supply because some grain is turned into ethanol and "land is diverted from grains to rapeseed and other inputs for biodiesel."