I have running my cars on sugar cane fuel for 20 years here in Brazil.It was Monsanto that came here to develop the processes. Now I can have a choice of fiiling up with sugar cane, soya, gasoline,or natural gas. It has always seemed odd to me that since it was an American multi national that made the process work here that it takes so long to make it work in the USA? The oil companies of course!! We grow corn for food, sugar cane for fuel including the national liquor. Driving happy here at a very resonable cost. One happy Canadian!

The study Andrew Leonard references in "Food, meet fuel" is the second time that the public recently has been treated to the 21st Century's most egregious euphemism to date: "food security."

Alongside that study, the federal government chose to avoid using the word "hunger" in its latest annual report on, well, hunger. Instead, the government reported that the number of Americans with very low "food security" has dropped slightly over previous years.

Hmmm. Imagine if, back in 1960, Edward R. Murrow had broadcast his famous CBS Reports documentary while entitling it "Food Security in America." Such a rousing call to action that would have made!

Presumably, we could extend this manner of speech to argue that many Americans have, for instance, a health security problem, an environmental security problem and a cash security problem. No longer need we think of ourselves and others like us as ill, contaminated ed or poor; we are -- huzzah! -- merely insecure.

"Food security" is a devalued way of approaching the issue of how much food should we use to fuel our engines versus fueling our bodies. But this dry economics approach doesn't address the underlying human condition that needs to be addressed if we are to ethically much less successfully pursue biofuel development.

Beyond that, "food security" is a phrase that portends language insecurity -- the expression of ideas in ways that increasingly destabilize and fuzz up rational policy debate.

Poster Chas, you beat me to the punch on that sugar thing by six minutes. Good post, but:

This tariff/subsidy thing could work the other way around, no? Might bio-fuel demand bring the world sugar price up to about the subsidized US price?

Would that be a classic Nikes-and-Escalades-for-the-peasants scenario? Would it also be a victory for free-markets? Maybe. Or maybe I am just simple-minded.

Corn prices would not fall back much if sugar beets took over the ethanol world. Corn would just go back to its normal chaos.

...check out the one-page article in the Nov. 27 issue of the New Yorker by Jamie Surowiecki about the intersection of sugar-protectionism, and biofuels.

To summarize, briefly:

The sugar industry is one of the most "cosseted" industries in America. By "relentlessly" seeking special protection from the Federal Government, sugar in the US costs at least twice as much as the world average.

It turns out that making ethanol from sugar is quite a bit less-costly than making it from corn, not only in direct costs, but in indirect costs (in water, soil depletion, etc.).

But, sugar is so expensive in the US that it makes no financial sense to use domestic sugar for the production of ethanol. And no-one can make any money importing cheaper foreign sugar to make ethanol, because of the sky-high tariffs imposed on foreign sugar, to protect domestic sugar producers.

Any attempt to reduce or eliminate these tariffs on foreign sugar imports, not only meets savage resistance from the sugar lobby, but also from the corn lobby (can you say, Archer-Daniels-Midland??), since the corn boys stand to make a killing selling corn-sourced ethanol to the market. When the Bush administration proposed reducing or killing the ethanol tariff last Spring, Barak Obama was among several midwestern senators who opposed the proposal (can you say Archer-Daniels-Midland??)...

To quote the most incendiary portion of the article: "...protectionist rules flourish because the benefits are concentrated among a small number of easy-to-identify winners, while the costs are spread out among the entire population. It may be annoying to pay a few more cents for sugar or ethanol, but most of us are not likely to lobby Congress about it."

Surowiecki goes on to say: "Our current policy is absurd even by Washington standards: Congress is paying billions in subsidies to get us to use more ethanol while keeping in place tariffs and quotas that guarantee that we'll use less. ... Because of the ethanol tariffs, we're imposing taxes on fuel from countries that are friendly to the U.S., but no tax at all on fuel from countries that are mong our most vehement opponents. Congressmen justify the barriers to foreign ethanol with talk of 'energy security.' but how is the U.S. more secure when it has to import oil fron Venezuela rather than ethanol from Brazil?"

It's a great article, and demonstrates the seeming futility of trying to eliminate corruption from our politics. Our system is so fucked-up now that this clear corruption is completely legal.

America. What a country.

What are the legal options of the government under the principle of Eminent Domain for seizure of patented intellectual property for the advancement of society? What are the distinctions between patent holdings and private property in the material sense? Certainly, if lawsuits against the government seeking carbon dioxide reductions can be justified(remains to be seen) for reasons of public health, seizure with just compensation of intellectual property that can mitigate global warming would be justifiable, no?

I know that this administration would never consider such things, but what if there was a rational person in charge?

This is an excellent analysis of what the IFPRI study really means for the longterm future of biofuels on a global scale.

Without some form of market regulation, biofuels may become just another resource that increases inequalities. But as the IFPRI study shows, there *are* chances to use biofuels as a means to reduce inequality and to bring more prosperity to the world's poor. It is these chances we must take.

There are many different ways in which such a regulation can take shape:

-via national sustainability criteria made by biofuel importing states: many governments are taking social sustainability seriously into account; the Dutch government for example, has been the first to draw up such rules for the import of biofuels, and social accounting is a crucial factor in the criteria

-via the civil society and social partner organisation (the ILO, the new World Union, etc...)

-even the WTO can play a role and show that it is committed to create a more fair trade regime; it could create trade rules that take into account social sustainability

-I strongly believe in consumer power; when the West imports biofuels, consumers will no doubt ask serious questions about what it took to make these fuels (consumers in Europe are already beginning to be worried about deforestation)

-Finally, our small organisation is working towards a multilateral approach in which the European Union utilizes its power to ensure that governments in the South create a socially responsible biofuels industry; it's in our mutual interest to do so

Keep up the essays on biofuels. They're some of the best out there, putting the issues in their larger context.

Yours,

Biopact team

http://www.biopact.com