Even the UN is not biased enough towards climate alarmism for the New York Times, which yesterday bowdlerized a joint statement on the present food crisis from three UN food organizations.
The UN statement is divided into short term and long term concerns. Included in the latter is “climate change,” which the Times dutifully quotes, and it quotes the UN’s long term solutions:
Low-income countries that rely on agricultural imports should invest in safety-net programs for the poor, they recommended. They also urged countries to bolster local production.
But the reason for the urgent joint statement is the short term concern—the immediate food crisis—in response to which the food organizations urge a very specific and immediate policy change that goes completely unmentioned in the Times report, despite it’s being endorsed by a whole further alphabet soup of food and policy organizations. Here is their joint appeal:
Lastly, we also need to review and adjust where applicable policies [are] currently in place that encourage alternative uses of grains. For example, adjusting biofuel mandates when global markets come under pressure and food supplies are endangered has been recommended by a group of international organizations including FAO, IFAD, the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the UN Conference on Trade and Development, WFP, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. That recommendation, made to the 2011 G20 summit in Paris, still stands today.
When crop failures threaten famine, STOP REQUIRING EVERYONE TO BURN FOOD AS AUTOMOBILE FUEL, at least temporarily. Okay, so they used more subtle language and they put this appeal at the end of their short statement, not the beginning, but this is the primary recommendation from all of these groups and publicizing it is the primary purpose of the UN’s joint statement. It is the only part of their statement that responds to the immediate crisis that the joint statement was issued to address, but the implied criticism of current green mandates—that they make no allowance for simple humanity—is apparently too heretical for anti-journalist Annie Lowrey and her anti-editors at the Times.
It’s not like people don’t know that government is mandating and subsidizing the burning of a huge amount of food as fuel, something that is regularly urged and lauded in the Times itself. Even the retro-grade Scientific American took note last year that more of the U.S. corn crop now goes to ethanol production than to any other use, and even an NYT reader can figure out that if you burn it you can’t eat it.
Still, to the green religionist, any mention of a possible downside to “green” biofuels is off-message. The job of the “green” journalist is to suppress all such contra-indications, even when the world’s food organizations are crying out en masse for the merest accommodation of poor people’s needs, so when the greenie gets a chance to report on that outcry, she hides it. Yes, this is journalistic malpractice, but green must be protected from any possible aspersion/correction as it drives full speed into a pole. These people are flat insane.
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But at the same time the UN Gang are putting regulatory hurdles in front of these poor country so they cannot use GM crops to increase their production. Right hand meet left hand!
@MattN says:
September 6, 2012 at 6:36 pm
I just got back from the grocery store, and I’m having trouble seeing any evidence of a “food crisis”. Fact is, we throw enough food away from spoilage to feed a small country…
Unless you are willing to share the blueprints for a Star Trek transporter system, the lack of local production in these poor countries will not be solved by waste in the developed world.
Ian H says: September 6, 2012 at 7:48 pm: The more extreme greens are not at all shy about stating their belief that that the world would be much better with a smaller population. Perhaps they see starvation as a feature and not a bug in their program.
Of course it is, pretty much like soaring energy prices due to taxes and inneficient production methods, thereby killing people by cold and inability to move around to get jobs, food, etc, and impoverishing entire countries so that people fall into the previous traps; and “uneducating” as many people as they can so that they cannot question the media or anything. And all that while enriching the bankers.
ostar notes above that “The corn that is used for ethanol and feed is not the type of corn that you can buy at [the] supermarket for human consumption.”
That is absolutely true and absolutely irrelevant. Number 2 Field Corn is not the same as sweet corn.
It’s irrelevant because that IS the type of corn that’s fed to cattle, chickens and other feed animals. The diversion of corn is increasing the cost of meat. I don’t eat that type of corn directly but I do eat it indirectly. Perhaps the increase in cost of meat is not much of a factor in first-world countries but it is proving a significant hit to those at the margins.
Note: You and I also eat great quantities of that type of corn post-processing – that is, after being converted to ingredients such as corn-starch, high fructose corn syrup, corn meal and a host of other products.
Second and probably more importantly, that corn is growing on land that is no longer available for alternative crops like wheat, rice, vegetables and the many other plants that we DO eat directly. When farmers are incented to shift their production away from food crops and even further toward industrial production, the supply of food-crops generally goes down and prices go up.
@ur momisugly Bill Marsh You’re not alone in this however. I was in the grocery store a few months ago and observed a lady lamenting the price of corn, “Why is corn so expensive now?” I offered that, in large part, it was because of the government mandated use of corn for ethanol, a gasoline substitute. I got a 1,000 mile stare in response.
And you are both wrong.
How many times do those of us in the industry have to tell you that the price of an ear of Sweetcorn (edible/foodstuff) and commercial corn (inedible/processor commodity) has zero economic relationship. Sweetcorn is grown on a tiny fraction of the arable land and the acres grown are tightly regulated by the players in that market (ie. Del Monte) because of longstanding experience on the problems and displacement of overproduction (elastic supply/ inelastic demand).
Discussion on the public policy aspects of Biofuels/Ethanol is fine and healthy, but this continuos strawman arguement that we are burning food is complete nonsense. Do you burn crude oil in a car’s gas tank? No, it must be processed first into a usuable form. Commercial corn is no different. Corn is a miracle crop because of the myriad uses it can be tailored to, ethanol production being just one, with the additional benefit of high quality livestock feed as a byproduct.
In regards to the price of corn, let’s have some context. 35 years ago, corn traded around $2.60/bushel. The purchasing power of $2.60 in 1976 is roughly $8.30 today. So even with the runup in corn price this summer, we are still below parity with the price of corn a generation past. In addition, many producers will not enjoy or take part in this latest recovery in price because: A. Drought reduced yield, in some cases to zero. B. Market analysts were predicting sub-$5.00 corn and many producers prepriced a heavy percentage of their 2012 production.
So farmers used to have a bunch of unwanted corn sitting around, rotting in the silos or just left in the fields? No?
Yes, it’s a different crop, but the artificial, distorted market has caused farmers to put marginal land into use, divert extra resources into producing corn, use extra fertilizer, water, etc.
It’s the same story whenever government policy interferes with the market. Resources that could be better put to use elsewhere are diverted; everyone else pays higher prices for everything else.
This article mischaracterizes both the NYT article and UN report. Read them yourself – follow the links. The UN report first mentions the problem of climate change in it’s 2nd paragraph and then repeatedly throughout the report. The paragraph about biofuel quoted above is the 18th paragraph and the only mention of fuels in the article.
The corn that gets turned into ethanol is “field corn,” which is also used as animal feed. Jimlion seems to be claiming that with field corn, we can have our cake and eat it too, that we can take the energy out of it by processing it into ethanol, and still have it be provide “high quality” nutrition to animals.
Jimlion calls this a “miracle,” and if it were true it would indeed be a miracle. I can see the ethanol byproduct being a good source of protein, but not calories, which are pretty much all removed, right? It might be a good source of calories per quantity, but then the quantity that comes out of ethanol production would have to be vastly reduced from the quantity that goes in. Something has to give here. There are no actual “miracles” producible by man.
Maybe Jim can link the exact numbers. Whatever efficiencies there are to ethanol production should be front and center. Corn with the calories removed sounds like good HUMAN food. But in no case should ethanol ever be mandated or subsidized, both on general principle (because mandates destroy the efficiency and flexibility of markets, as seen in the present food crisis), and because ethanol is an absolutely ROTTEN fuel for many vehicles, especially anything that gets stored unused for significant periods.
To satisfy an utterly fraudulent eco-alarm, together with the subversion of the public interest by corn-state corruption, millions of engines are getting destroyed every year at untold cost and inconvenience. What I wouldn’t give to be able to leave my old-timey RV fueled up for the winter with straight gas instead of E-10. Is this a free country anymore? Throw the corn-commies out!
Dodgy Geezer above said “Everyone on this Earth has a couple of cubic kilometers of water available to them, which will NEVER go away.”
First, that’s not really true. According to the UN Water Statistics, the total volume of water on earth is 1.4 billion cubic kilometers. With a world population of just under 7 billion, that works out to 0.2 cubic kilometers each.
That’s irrelevant, though, because (and this is more than just potable/non-potable), only a few percent of that total volume is fresh water. Sea water is essentially unusable for either direct consumption or irrigation. (Yes, it can be desalinated but not in any economically feasible scale.) Worse, the majority of that freshwater is inaccessible, for example, being concentrated in remote areas like the Amazon river basin. I’ve seen reliable estimates that say as little as 0.007% is accessible for human use. That puts us at about 14 cubic meters each.
Rob claims that “This article mischaracterizes both the NYT article and UN report.” He claims that the UN report mentions the problem of climate change “repeatedly.” False. It mentions it ONCE, the mention that I credited it with, and that the Times focused on. There is a further mention of droughts and floods as a cause of crop failure but there is no attempt to link droughts and floods with climate change, which was NOT the focus of the UN urgent statement.
Yes, as I wrote, the joint call by 8 international food organizations to relax ethanol mandates comes “at the end of their short statement, not the beginning,” (how is that a mischaracterization?), but it is referred to at the very beginning. The “joint statement” is subtitled: “UN Agencies appeal for swift, coordinated action.”
The only “swift, coordinated action” that is called for is reduction in ethanol mandates. There is no call for reducing carbon. No action re climate is contemplated. They state long term goals focused on social support for the poor and for small farmers, and they call for immediate backing off of ethanol mandates. That’s it. There is only one call for swift action, and it is stated as a coordinated call by 8 food organizations. Pretty hard to miss.
I understand that greenies like reporter Annie Lowrey and commenter Rob read with a filter on their brains that ignores whatever does not support what they perceive to be their side, but in Annie’s case, this is journalistic malpractice. In Rob’s case, trollery.
So about 40% of US grain is used for fuel. And what percentage of fuel usage does this represent, one may ask? Not a lot, it would seem. Is this waste of good food in any way worth it?
@Alec
Here you go:
http://www.ethanolrfa.org/pages/ethanol-facts-agriculture
and for your old RV:
http://ethanolrfa.org/page/-/RFA%20Gas%20Ethanol%20Blends%20and%20Classic%20Auto.pdf?nocdn=1
To your point on storage, and this is completely anecdotal, my small engine guy at Ace Hardware is very hard on me about the lack of 100% unleaded available for small engine use. However, he is just as hard on the refineries that he believes are producing a lower standard fuel overall that even without the ethanol would not have the shelf life the fuels in the past had.
As far as ethanol destroying millions of engines, more nonsense.
http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2011/03/07/the-fog-collectors-harvesting-water-from-thin-air/
I use this bumper sticker to educate other drivers about this issue: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/66343417/Ethonol.png
I have had one or two people ask me where they can get it-unfortunately I have to say that I made it myself at Zazzle.com and don’t have any additional with me.
Just an engineer took Schitzree to task above with the assumption that the conversion of a wood-burning stove to corn is limited to the use of corn COBs as fuel. That is an unfair assumption. Many wood-burning stoves are pellet stoves. Use of feed corn in a pellet stove is a fairly easy conversion, though it does involve modifications to the feeder and different treatment of the ash.
While I suppose some of the wood-to-corn stove conversions were cob-based, most that I am aware of were pellet to kernel.
The local foods movement is another misdeed of misrule by the misinformed as well.
A woman who is clever at feeding her family can purchase a bag of frozen vegetables from Wal Mart for 1.62 USD. The vegetables come from 3 continenents and include watercress, baby corn, sugar snap peas, and bell peppers, among others. This is wonderful and tasteful food for a home, and is provided for a good price. The local only movement would restrict diets and subject people to the vagaries of local crop failures and prices.
Of course, the company who provides the frozen vegetable mix from 3 continents for such a low price has encountered harassment from unions, gov’t agencies, and lawyers.
Wonderful column by Rawls.
It is what goes into cornmeal and corn chips.
Just an engineer on September 7, 2012 at 7:41 am said:
Please don’t assume I’m ignorant. If I say corn burner I mean something that burns corn.
http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/monroe42.html
http://www.cornflame.net/faqs.html#2
Lots of info on corn burning stoves
Not sure where you or ehow got your facts, but I can tell you from experiance that my stepdad’s corn burner burned actual corn.
(in any disagreement between what a farmer’s done and what an engineer’s read, bet on the farmer 😉
Spector says:
September 7, 2012 at 12:03 am
Of Course, “End of Growth” Canadian economist Jeff Rubin…
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/12/15/dan-gardner-jeff-rubin-is-a-guru-you-shouldnt-listen-to/
Jeff Rubin is an almost eerily perfect example of the sort of expert people should not listen to — but do anyway. The foundation of Rubin’s fame is a correct call he made a decade ago. At the time, oil prices were low and stable. Most experts were sure they would stay that way. But Rubin became convinced the world was approaching “peak oil” — the point at which oil production would cease to grow and the price of oil would soar.
As Rubin predicted, oil prices started to climb in 2003. Up and up they went, to previously unimaginable highs. In the first half of 2008, oil topped $140 a barrel. Rubin and the few others who called the surge became media darlings.
But in the summer of 2008, the price started to slide. In September came the financial meltdown. The global economy shuddered and the price of oil collapsed. By the end of the year, it was barely above $30 a barrel.
Everybody’s An Expert
Putting predictions to the test.
by Louis Menand December 5, 2005
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/05/051205crbo_books1
+1 for Lew on the fact that you have a farm That is a limited and precious resource, and one that is for growing the food .
You use water, you use fertilizer, you cause soil erosion, and a host of a million other things that a result of mechanized farming which is something of a very precious and very recent event in mankind in which we now have the means to feed everyone with relative ease.
It is beyond galactic stupidity for anybody to stand here suggest that somehow the energy, the time, the efforts, and the resources of using precious farmland for growing food is somehow something that doesn’t count as land that is something we have for that of growing food to feed people!
It is beyond stupid, and beyond any aspect of intelligent reasoned debate for anybody to stand here and suggest that somehow this resource, and the energy and Time &Resources to obtain that resource for growing food is somehow a resource that doesn’t count as something for growing food to feed people!
The most confusing part here, is those attempting to come up with some type of intelligent logical explanation as to even considering this idea.
Why is it when this debate comes up we have a few people, perhaps from the local circus, (or maybe the corn lobby???) or perhaps some unemployed drunken rodeo clown that shows up here and attempts to make some kind of “insane” intelligent case that such a land resource is somehow not something that can be used to grow food to feed people? I mean exactly how stupid do you want people here to be?
In fact exactly how stupid you think people are in general?
I am attempting to come with a “shred” of logical explanation how anybody can think that a PRECIOUS land resource for the growing of food is not somehow something that can be used for growing of food ?
And some of the worst counter arguments that come up are even more beyond this galactic stupidity of burning fuel in vehicles. The one that came up last time was how we use our front lawns for growing the food? Well in fact that possibility does exist, and during the last word war this was encouraged and it was called a “victory garden”. So people were encouraged to take any space they had to grow extra food and vegetables.
However we’re not really in a wartime economy, and I suppose if things did get bad enough, and we continue this road down the galactic stupidity of following the socialist and green programs, we’re going to end up like the socialist economy’s of Eastern Europe where the ONLY food you have is from your own garden. Eastern Europe was once the breadbasket of Europe until stupid socialism took over and their people began to starve and they could not grow enough food by adopting these socalist stupid ideas.
Gee, following down the road of such stupidity such as suggesting that we use good land resources for burning fuel in your car while people go hungry is stupid, and worse such a road is a road to hunger for the people.
I can only conclude that today must be that day then the local mental institution is giving out day passes because they’ve run out of medication for their people, and they Gotta let ’em out for few hours to get some fresh air.
There’s simply not the person of reason and thought that can come up with any reasoned intelligent debate as to why we should be using such precious land resources when we see headlines that apparently bad weather is causing food shortages!
This is really not much different than saying we have spare electricity, so let’s throw away and use it for something other than what we need Electricity for. If you do that, you pretty rapidly wind up not having enough electricity, because you’re throwing it away without cause for concern. And in fact you look at places like California, they’re not building energy infrastructure, and thinking they have all the spare electricity they need and thus can now pursue stupid things like attempting to run their electrical system by building a bunch of silly windmills.
There’s lame, and then there’s really stupid and people being irresponsible. In California, the result is now they have rolling blackouts, and worse they simply import electricity from coal burning states where they realize they actually need to generate something called electricity to keep up a decent standard of living.
And of course if they respected electricity, then they would have a proper energy program in the first place, and the same respect and utilization of land and farming resources in a society for growing food to feed people is a precious and hard fought resource in our society that we must protect and keep is such. This is almost similar to those who fought in previous wars to give us our freedoms.
And someone has to stop giving out those day passes to people who escape from institutions, are off their meds for few hours, and manage to somehow come here to WUWT to get away making some post about some nonsense about how we should be using great productive farmland to burn fuel in our cars.
And, to be 100% fair, if some people do have extra corn to burn as fuel, then I respect that – but not a government program to force feed such a policy and use billions of tons of food in this process.
Thanks to mikerossander for backing me up.
All right, here’s the thing. I’ve been living in the ‘big city’ now for over a decade, but I havn’t forgotten my roots or lost contact with my family and friends outside of town, so all this talk of corn really brought out the farmboy in me. And needless to say most farmboys don’t take kindly to being called ignorant. But after I calmed back down I got to wondering about Just’s corncob burners. I hadn’t heard of them before, but that didn’t mean they wern’t out there. So I went back and reread the ehow article he linked to.
My problem with this statment is this. The combine’s used to harvest feed corn don’t collect the cob. The kurnel is shelled in the combine and the cob is blown out the back with the rest of the chaff. It never leaves the field. Now I assume with sweetcorn it’s different, since it isn’t dried out and hard when harvested, but I don’t know. Everyone I know grows feed corn, soybean, and maybe some winter wheat. The only sweetcorn we ever grew was in the garden.
Both of these are true of burning corn kurnels, but I don’t see how they can be true for cobs. Corn cobs are light, with a low density. The kurnel is were all the suger is stored. If the cob held any we would be useing IT to make ethanol.
I’m sure you could burn corncob, but I can’t see you getting any more energy out of it then from any other plant waste. Mind you, I don’t know that for sure. Has anyone any experiance with a corn cob burner? I’d love to hear from someone with actual knowledge on this if you have.
Cobs manually shucked of kernels are set out on side of roads by families in piled up gunny sacks where my tropical farm is. Piled high lorries of middlemen circulate regularly post- harvest to buy cob sacks for cash & resale to feed processors. One poultry feed use for hammer milled maize cobs is as mixing agent for feed supplements (ex: lslurry made up from feed elaborators’ dry stock of choline chloride).
Roasted maize on the cob is seasonally popular with people. People on the go can be seen with a half eaten ear. Despite sparse local refrigeration & plastic costly that cob holds remaining kernels for finishing off later on.
jimlion’s reply above is interesting (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/06/nyt-blames-food-crisis-on-climate-change-hides-plea-to-reduce-government-mandated-burning-of-food-for-fuel/#comment-1073253). If most of the corn is grown as livestock feed, then this problem again boils down to people in industrialized nations eating too much meat. If we cut down on our consumption of meat, more food could be grown.
Somehow I doubt any one of you guys would be willing to make that sacrifice. I certainly won’t! (In fact, next week I am driving to my local farmer to buy 64 kg of beef)
Also the argument of using excess food in the west to supply developing nations needs to be carefully thought through. Free food means the local farmers in those countries will be unable to make a living. Reports show that the end result is heavily reduced farming and a greater dependency on our “generosity”.
This is obviously not a good situation. I’d also like to point out that the price of fuel is quite high at the moment. There seems to be a connection between food prices and prices of fuel, and that connection is hardly ethanol.
BTW: Ethanol is a wonderful fuel. It burns clean and allows for higher compression (though I admit it would be difficult to achieve higher compression in an engine also designed for normal gasoline). Some engines will even offer more kick in the pants when run on E85 (e.g. the Saab 9-3, the 9-5 OTOH was tuned to preserve more E85 rather than increase the power).
“If most of the corn is grown as livestock feed, then this problem again boils down to people in industrialized nations eating too much meat.”
The farmland used to grow the corn is the issue. That is what is being wasted and is distorting the food supply and prices (alberkallal, above comment) Commodities speculators also do their fair share of damage, and there are others here who have mastered that part of the equasion.
“Reports show that the end result is heavily reduced farming and a greater dependency on our “generosity”.”
And everyone knows, the UN prefers our generosity in cash.