Don't Bash Farmers for Making a Living & Blame Biofuels for the Price of Food

Cliff Bradley ~ Missoula, Montana

April 4th, 2008

The news has been full of articles criticizing biofuels—that is ethanol and biodiesel—for driving up US food prices and for starving the world's poor. However, it seems to me that debates on biofuels can't be reduced to the simple black and white of food vs. fuel. The global agriculture and food economy is much to complex.

First, farmers just can't win. Now, for the first time in more than 30 years, grain prices are above production cost and farmers might, finally, make a decent living. Yet, from reading the papers and op-eds, you would think that farmers making a living will ruin the US economy. Ethanol did drive up corn prices in the US, but wheat prices tripled due to drought in Australia and increased demand in China, which has nothing to do with ethanol. But, despite the increases, the price a farmer receives for corn or wheat, or anything else for that matter, is a small part of what consumers in this country pay at the grocery store. According to USDA surveys, even with a tripling of wheat prices, farmers receive about 6% of the value of a loaf of bread and about 12 cents in a five dollar box of Wheaties. In a centralized, food economy where the average tomato travels 1200 miles, $4 a gallon diesel fuel has far more impact on the cost of food than the price of corn.

I think $5.00 per bushel corn is a good thing— $10 for a bushel of wheat is the best thing to happen for rural Montana in decades. For more than 30 years, politicians and agribusiness companies promised to increase farm income. It never happened. In the 1970's wheat and soybeans were weapons in the cold war. In the 1980's high fructose corn syrup promised booming markets. “Free Trade” with the promise of global markets was the mantra of the 1990's. Through it all farmers sold subsidized commodities to the big grain companies at prices below the cost of production. Thousands of farmers went out of business, towns died and taxpayers paid out billions in subsidies that largely benefited a handful of agribusiness giants. Willie Nelson with Farm Aid concerts actually created a charity for US farmers.

If cheap grain were the key to feeding the world's poorest people, then thirty years of cheap, subsidized US grain dumped on world markets should have ended hunger. But if anything, it made it worse. According to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, more than 800 million people in the world now lifelong hunger, and they live mostly in rural areas, driven off the land by global economic policies.

In several opinion pieces, I have seen the statement that the corn to fill an SUV gas tank contains enough calories to feed a person for a year. But I think a much better comparison is that we now use the same amount of corn to make enough high fructose corn syrup to sweeten 250 gallons of soda pop. The US does not grow corn to feed the world; we grow corn to produce marbled beef, fat hogs, Chicken Mc Nuggets and high fructose corn syrup. The corn we do export is genetically modified livestock feed, not food for the poor.

Biofuel critics cite ethanol as the cause of high corn prices and the Tortilla riots last year in Mexico. But an article last June by Luis Hernández Navarro in the Mexican paper La Jornada describes the real reason behind the increase in tortilla prices. The global grain companies accumulated and sat more than a million tons of Mexican tortilla corn from the summer 2006 harvest. They paid US$123 a ton, then later sold it in Mexico City for $320 per ton— more than twice the US price at the time. Much of the poverty and hunger in Mexico is because the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, let the global grain companies dump subsidized US feed corn on Mexico. It is NAFTA and the grain companies— not ethanol— that increased the price of tortillas while driving 2 million Mexican farmers off their land.

Mexico is just one example of the globalized “free market economy” for food in a world where a billion people have no money and no land.

Biofuels are not the problem.

We should not allow multinational ag companies to cut rain forest for biofuels to supply the world's least efficient transportation system— nor should we allow oil companies to determine US foreign policy or destroy Northern Alberta to develop tar sands. But unlike oil or coal it is possible to sustainably produce biofuels. And biofuels, coupled with really serious conservation is the only source of transportation fuel that can come on line in time to do anything about global warming. Biofuels are also the only source of transportation fuel where simple technology and low capital cost make possible diverse and local ownership—to sustain rather than drain local economies. Farmers can grow their own fuel so they can afford to feed the rest of us—Or imagine a locally owned biodiesel commuter train between Missoula and Hamilton. Poor counties could produce biofuels, not to export to the US but to save their own economies from the staggering cost of importing fuel.

We need to debate biofuels, but we need an informed debate focused on how to do it right. With oil at $100 per barrel and when a handful of corporations control global grain markets, it makes no sense to bash farmers for making a living and blame biofuels for the price of food.

I'm Cliff Bradley for the Alternative Energy Resources Organization. My commentary is one of the many conversations we're having at AERO. AERO is a grassroots membership organization that's been building communities by linking people with sustainable agriculture and energy solutions for 35 years. To join the conversation and become part of the solution, call us in Helena at (406) 443-7272.