biofuel rundown

It appears that the press has had a chance to digest.

John Vidal writing for South Africa's Mail & Guardian walks you thru the ramifications of changing food into fuel like no other article I've seen of such brevity. Yet he leaves virtually no stone unturned.

He starts with the producer: in this case a corn farmer in the US State of Nebraska who lives near a little burg that has been down on its luck for quite sometime but is now enjoying a boom from ALL THE MONEY rolling into the local economy for grain ...any kind of grain ...but in this case it's corn. This scenario is playing out just the same way in the Argentine campo.

In the ol' junkie parlance, "ever'body's gittin' well." But it's a pushme-pullyou world and the biofuel fueled prosperity is twisting almost everything that goes in your mouth:

"The same fields that surround Jagels’s house may be bringing new money to rural America, but they are also helping to push up the price of bread in Manchester, tortillas in Mexico City and beer in Madrid. As a direct result of what is happening in places like Nebraska, food aid for the poorest in Southern Africa, pork in China and beef in Britain are all more expensive."

Even as Mrs. Mike y yo have pulled 750 acres out of beef production here, farmers everywhere are deciding not to plant all the lovely grains and veggies that we humans and animals love ...in favor of corn and soy for automobile fuel. The "cornhusker" in the story sells his corn directly to the biofuel factory ...and the rest of us sell our corn to the people he used to sell it to. That raises prices all across the board for what keeps us all alive.

Why? Well, if you liked the Iraq War ...you'll love biofuel.

"Challenged by President George Bush to produce 133-billion litres of non-fossil transport fuels by 2017 to reduce United States dependency on imported oil, Jagels and thousands like him are patriotically turning the US corn belt from the bread basket of the world into an enormous fuel tank."

US subsidies for biofuel production are up from obscene levels to someplace that approaches morbid. All that money is sucking food out of people's mouths all over the world. Cheap food, that is ...and if it continues indefinitely there could actually not be enough left to feed us all at any price.

Before that happens you and I will see a few ugly things up close and personal in the supermercados. We are terribly spoiled and lucky people; we take for granted the tremendous variety of foods not only in the produce section but as a consequence in all the other aisles as well. As the demand for corn and soy based biofuels increases ...it won't just be me and the missus pulling marginal farmland away from beef.

No matter what any farmer or rancher in the world produced last year ...this year and for some time to come he will be trying every trick in the book to get in on the goldrush and change to producing biofuel crops.

(I am very curious to know if the prices we all experienced here for this winter's vegetables were due in part to producers changing to corn and soy.)

The article closes with the prospect of brighter days to come as the marketplace starts to come back into balance and as producers begin to push uncultivated land into production.

But that won't happen until the US stops pumping billions into the pockets of agricultural swing states to fund the biofuel myth (it takes more fuel to produce biofuel from corn than the corn gives back ...which COULD explain why a Texas oilman is competing with petrol without ANY complaints from oil companies!)

Just like the cornhusker, we're making more money per acre than ever. This is REAL trickle-down; Bush Biofuel Bucks go right into my pocket. But I'll suffer too when the only thing for dinner is a corn-soy burger washed down, no doubt, with barrels of ExxonMobile white lightning

...when all I really want is a salad, a steak, and a glass of malbec.