Drive 1,000 Miles or Feed a Person for a Year? The Biofuels Dilemma

With hungry, angry people taking to the streets in countries on every continent -- from Morocco to Mexico and Pakistan to the Philippines, and at least 20 other nations -- the biofuel debate is clearly moving into new territory.

Arguments for and against using crops to make fuel are no longer focusing on energy ratios or "independence from foreign oil" or feel-good environmentalism. The headlines today are about people needing food to eat -- and right now.

Politicians who once supported biofuel expansion are now backpedaling fast in the face of irate grocery shoppers in this country and an increase in hunger across the planet. Representative James McGovern, D-Mass., was one of the first national lawmakers to raise alarms about the impact of grain-based biofuels on food prices, telling the New York Times last month, "If there was a secret vote [in Congress], there is a pretty large number of people who would like to reassess what we are doing." Now 24 Republican members of Congress, citing high food prices, have come out into the open to urge a retreat from the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which mandates rapid increases in biofuel production.

State officials across the country are also looking to bail out of the biofuel rush. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has formally requested that the federal government relax biofuel requirements imposed on his state. Also responding to runaway food costs, the Missouri legislature is considering a rollback of its own recently passed law requiring that gasoline must be mixed with a minimum percentage of ethanol.

Filling gas tanks or plates?

The agriculture lobby has legendary clout in Washington, so current biofuel targets, along with heavy subsidies that keep the industry alive, will stay in place for now. The 2008 farm bill, which has entered the homestretch in Congress, cuts the corn-ethanol subsidy by only 6 cents, to 45 cents per gallon, while the subsidy for the "next generation" of ethanol (to be made from grass, straw, and other cellulosic materials) will rise to more than a dollar a gallon. To soften the rapid food-price inflation that's expected to result, the new law will increase food aid to lower-income Americans.

Perhaps the starkest measure of the car culture's energy appetite is the fact that the state of Iowa, the nation's leading corn producer, will soon be importing corn. If a meteorite were to land randomly in Iowa, there's a 35 percent chance it would land in a cornfield; Iowa's corn harvest last year contained more calories than the state's human population would consume in 85 years of eating; yet Iowa will be hauling corn in from other states. The grain will be fed to a multitude of new fuel-ethanol factories, along with the state's existing corn syrup and livestock industries.

The world is learning fast that when fuel demand competes with food needs for the sun's energy, it's not a fair fight. The energy contained in the gasoline that fills a typical SUV's tank contains approximately the same number of calories as are required in the annual diet of one adult. Or, rather than picking on SUVs, consider the energy burned by a Prius hybrid on a trip from San Francisco to San Diego and back. That would also feed a person for a year.

Measured in energy units like kilocalories, world demand for liquid fuels (gasoline, jet fuel, diesel and now biofuels) is currently more than six times the global demand for food. In energy terms, fuel demand will shoot up three times as fast as food demand between now and 2030.

But such comparisons don't prove cause-and-effect. Can the pumping of ethanol into American fuel tanks really make it harder for parents in Yemen or Indonesia to feed their families?

An ethanol industry-funded group called the New Fuels Alliance doesn't think so. In its briefing paper entitled "Fuel vs. Food: No Conflict" (pdf), the group insists (reviving the old Cold War term for less powerful nations) that "Third world food shortages are largely due to political and social issues such as poverty, government corruption, and inefficient distribution ... Corn prices have little impact on food availability in the Third World ... Food availability per capita is at an historic high."