Andrew Leonard writes: "But the real key to addressing global hunger is not to keep food prices low, but to make economies rich."

Yes!

And then:

"Which means the real challenge for government policy-makers is ensuring that the benefits of higher prices for agricultural commodities are actually captured by small farmers and rural communities, and not by corporate agribusinesses."

No!

Which looks more like the profile of an affluent country to you: small farmers utterly dependent on fluctuating weather and commodity prices, or shareholders with investment portfolios that include (the horror, the horror) agribusiness corporations? Especially after you've just written that small farmers have a difficult time competing with efficient (if grotesquely subsidized) ag corporations?

Tortilla price hikes are bad enough. But beer and tequila? How are we supposed to continue anesthetizing ourselves against the daily drumbeat of war, ecological disaster, poverty and injustice?

You could make up for your lack of booze by working up a good self righteous lather over the evils of opium.

But alas, unless we're talking about alcohol, or the old Dutch East India Company, drug policy is not a part of How the World Works.

Maybe someone should start a column on How the World Doesn't Work for that policy discussion.

The efficiency of American agriculture is bought with massive inputs of petroleum through mechanization, fertilizers and pesticides and at the expense of soil, environmental and public health and sustainability. It is more akin to a mining operation than anything else. Whether you believe 'peak oil' is upon us or not, the planet is not producing any more cheap energy sources akin to oil and at some point those petroleum-based inputs American agriculture relies on are going to start to become more and more expensive, likely just at the time climate change and environmental degradation are going to really start making it harder and harder to wring 'productivity' out of our damaged land (having a portfolio loaded with ConAgra, ADM, Cargill, et al won't seem like such a wonderful thing then). In the long-term it may be the small-scale/subsistence farmer who will prove to be more 'efficient' (if agri-business and 'globalization' doesn't succeed with plans to eradicate them first).

The fact of the matter is that making corn into ethanol in this country is just a pander to influential swing state farmers cloaked in fashionable environmental respectability. It ought to tell you something that a certifiable imbecile like George W. Bush supports it. (And, to Obama, I say, "For shame!" though I'll let you have this one because some pandering is always necessary.)

It turns out that if we turned ALL our corn production into ethanol, it would supply only 10% of our vehicular energy needs, and that's not taking into account the fact that it takes somewhat more energy to make ethanol from corn than that ethanol contains (in other words, that the whole thing is a thermodynamic sham).

The thermodynamics of making corn out of ethanol implies, then, that it makes more sense to leave those fields fallow and instead tap all the energy that WOULD have been used to plant, harvest, and process the corn. Or, better yet, why not just eat the corn, or perhaps (to help Mexican farmers) practice the free trade we preach and stop subsidizing it!

1) How much energy it takes to make fuel from corn is still being debated, with some studies showing it takes more and some showing it takes much less. This is not settled and pretending it is is just as dishonest as the people you're railing against.

2) No one alternate fuel needs to provide ALL America's energy needs. No one fuel does it today. There'll be a combination of fuels and conservation that'll allow us to wean ourselves from the current energy sources. Pretending otherwise is a red herring.

I think you have the politics right, if not the physics.

Laws of thermodynamics being what they are, all of our energy resources are a wash from the point of view of physics, i.e. energy is neither created nor destroyed. It's really about getting existing processes to do the work for you. For instance, the amount of energy you get out of a liter of oil is the same as the energy that goes into making that liter of oil, but geological forces do the work for you, so oil is "efficient."

Solar power is inefficient from an abstract point of view because it takes energy to build solar panels and because solar energy is lost in transmission and conversion, but, since the sun is going to be shining regardless of whether we build solar panels, solar power can be efficient from a practical point of view, because the sun does most of the work.

Ethanol is, at the moment, an inefficient energy source. It takes tons of work to grow corn, produce ethanol, and truck or pipe the stuff around. The process may get more efficient over time, but our current ethanol regime is dominated by political concerns rather than by practical concerns.

The amount of energy you get out of a liter of oil is the same as the energy that goes into making that liter of oil, but geological forces do the work for you, so oil is "efficient."

ummm...only if you ignore the energy that is "wasted" in any thermodynamic process.... the same reason why the production of corn for making ethanol to run SUVs is probably not going to be a viable option.

Yes, our energy doesn't have to come from one source but multiple sources. But is this country serious about exploring viable options? When will rich east coast liberals give up their war against the windmills? When will there be electric cars on the US roads (just take a look at the business that Reva is doing in India)? And, dare one even mention nuclear power? For the longest time, the US was not even a member of the ITER project.

And before you even talk energy production, how about getting serious about conservation? Not conservation, as in "I am rich, so I can afford to buy more carbon point", but conservation as in.... you know.... maybe we really don't need that heated indoor pool. Al Gore, the latest environmental messiah, apparently burns up more energy in his house than entire third world villages.