CORN MOB
Thread started by
POOP DICK at 03.20.09 - 5:30 pm
Indonesia is a land in turmoil, home to massive volcanoes, tsunamis, and earthquakes. On Monday, January 14, it experienced a brand new type of disturbance, the world's first food riot caused by another nation pandering to the global warming mob. Indonesians took to the streets, demanding that their government to do something about the price of soybeans, a dietary staple.
All over the world, food prices are on the rise. For most of the late 1990s and up until 2005, the price of beans on the Chicago Board of Trade had remained stable at about $5 a bushel. Since then, they have shot up over 150 percent, to around $13. Corn has doubled, to $5. Wheat prices have tripled.
It all started with the 2005 Energy Policy Act, passed by a Republican congress and signed by a Republican president, mandating that an increasing amount of ethanol be admixed with gasoline. The bill was sold as a road to "energy independence" and as lowering the amount of carbon dioxide we emit, reducing dreaded global warming.
By now, 15 percent of our corn crop is being distilled, diverted from the proper purpose for such distillates (i.e. drinking), combusted, and sent out your car's tailpipe.
The Act required production of four billion gallons of ethanol in 2006, increasing by approximately 700 million gallons each succeeding year. Enter those familiar characters supply, demand, and price. Supply tightens, prices escalate, and more and more farmers divert cropland from other crops (mainly soybeans and wheat) to corn. In the U.S., most crops are turned into animal feed, but in poorer countries, such as Indonesia (soybeans) or Mexico (corn for tortillas) they are consumed directly.
The ethanol malaise has also hit here at home, as a trip to the grocery store will reveal that the price of just about everything containing corn, wheat, or soybean products, or parts of animals fed on those crops, is skyrocketing. It's hard to find a decent steak for under $12 a pound these days.
It's only going to get worse. As if to add more 200-proof to the fire, President Bush, citing global warming in his 2007 State of the Union speech, called for production of 35 billion gallons of ethanol by 2017, displacing 20 percent of our current gasoline consumption with this intoxicating elixir. This is five times the amount mandated in the 2005 Energy Act. He claimed that this would help us get off Middle Eastern oil.
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I still don't know what's so appealing about the use of corn as a bio-fuel.
While sugarbeets and sugarcane(yeah, deforestation is a problem though) could yield more fuel per acre, politicians and industry people here continually push corn as if it's the only source of ethanol around.
My guess is the poor farmers in the Mid-West are wanting a little, extra bang for their buck and see motor-fuel as a more profitable enterprise than a corn-eating contest.
If anything, the farmers should distill enough for their own machinery and stay devoted towards the food-market.
Last thing I need to be faced with is an evening meal of "soycakes w/molasses", like in that '87 miniseries,
Amerika
bentstrider03.20.09 - 5:40 pm
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