Unintended eco-consequences

There might be a bigger enviro-scam than ethanol, but I can't think of it at the moment:

In recent years, we've heard that climate change could be catastrophic for nature and humanity. But it's becoming increasingly evident that over the next few decades, climate-change policies could prove even more catastrophic.

Food riots have erupted in Mexico, Morocco, Egypt, Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, Mauritania, Cameroon, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. Vietnam, Cambodia, India and Egypt have all placed restrictions on their rice exports to drive down domestic prices. Pakistan has reinstated food rationing, which is also under discussion in Bangladesh and rumored in Sri Lanka.

Supposedly climate-friendly policies in the United States and the European Union — subsidizing the production and consumption of such renewable biofuels as ethanol and biodiesel — have diverted such crops as corn, soybeans and palm oil from food to fuel. This, in turn, has increased prices for food worldwide at a time when the highly populous and newly prosperous East and South Asian countries are demanding more of it.

[...]

These food-price spikes threaten to undo one of the world's signal post-World War II achievements. In the '50s and '60s, many feared that famine was inevitable. Instead, we witnessed a vast reduction in chronic hunger, from 37 percent of the developing world's population in 1970 to 17 percent in 2001 — despite an 83 percent increase in population.

Increased agricultural productivity, trade in food commodities and aid from the developed world resulted in a 75 percent drop in global food prices after 1950, making food available to the bottom-rung billions worldwide. The current bump-up in food prices threatens to reverse these gains.

The conversion of natural habitat land for produce-cultivation purposes had been the single-largest threat to biodiversity worldwide, but over the last half century, the global agricultural footprint has nearly stabilized. Now, this achievement is also in jeopardy.

What the US ethanol subsidies do for corn, the European Union's biodiesel subsidies do for palm oil. EU policies stoke an artificial demand for biodiesel, leading to the clearance of high-biodiversity forests in Malaysia and Indonesia. In both the European Union and the United States, lands previously set aside for nature conservation are once again coming under the plow to meet subsidized biofuel demand.

(via Rob Breakenridge)

Damian P.

Posted by damian at April 21, 2008 12:17 PM