Faulty Premise Leads to Shaky Article

 In his latest post in the Energy Tribune misguided columnist Robert Bryce jumps the tracks by trying to draw a correlation between increasing ethanol production from corn and the rising number of undernourished people in the world.

The headline on the article kind of says it all… “The Latest on the Ethanol Scam: US Ethanol Industry’s Grain Consumption in 2009 Was Enough to Feed 330 Million People.”

His argument has too many holes to address but let’s start with the shaky premise it is all built upon…that we use little of our commercial corn crop for human food. People eat very limited quantities of the commercial corn grown in the U.S. Roughly 99% of what we grow in this country is field corn, not sweet corn or the canned vegetable in your pantry.

 A miniscule part of this crop is used as corn chips or food ingredients. Much is fed to livestock or exported for the same purpose. But the fastest category of corn use is non-food. Corn is basically a solar collector that converts light energy to sugars/calories. Those calories stored in the kernel can then be released for food, fuel, fiber, degradable plastics, fabric etc….and why not?

Many of the products corn replaces come from imported petroleum. We are growing record amounts of corn each year and production is escalating due to technology and good management and we are growing it on 20% fewer acres. As for your humanitarian argument, put a sock in it. We don’t have a corn supply problem for any purposes or markets.

Our yields are soaring and we grew more than 13 billion bushels of corn in 2009. Bin busting records are becoming so common there is little fanfare when it happens. But suffice it to say that burgeoning production has more than met any increased demands in the market resulting from ethanol.

The U.S. gives more humanitarian aid than anyone in the world including distribution of corn to needy nations, to the tune of $1 billion to $2 billion a year just through one program alone (Title 2 PL80). But raising corn is a business and a reasonable percentage of the crop needs to be purchased to give farmers an incentive to grow and keep them in business.

The biggest problems facing the poor and undernourished are:  archaic agriculture that needs to be modernized so they can do a better job of feeding themselves; lack of jobs, weak economies that don’t allow them to buy U.S. food products; and stone age transportation that doesn’t allow them to get the food where it is needed.

Most of the needy nations of the world don’t have the capacity to distribute food to where it is needed even if we dumped tons on the dock every day. Solve these three problems and the nation’s farmers will grow all the corn the world needs.  

Until then please consider finding a more reputable source than the Earth Policy Institute which is steered by the well-known save-the-planet quack Lester Brown. EPI is an agenda driven outfit that clearly has no understanding of modern agriculture. Look for more information on Lester here soon.