Buffy Holt points out a sad state of affairs:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — It was lunchtime in one of Haiti’s worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau.
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“When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day,” Charlene said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds 3 ounces he weighed at birth.
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Food prices around the world have spiked because of higher oil prices, needed for fertilizer, irrigation and transportation. Prices for basic ingredients such as corn and wheat are also up sharply, and the increasing global demand for biofuels is pressuring food markets as well.

The problem is particularly dire in the Caribbean, where island nations depend on imports and food prices are up 40 percent in places.

The global price hikes, together with floods and crop damage from the 2007 hurricane season, prompted the U.N. Food and Agriculture Agency to declare states of emergency in Haiti and several other Caribbean countries. Caribbean leaders held an emergency summit in December to discuss cutting food taxes and creating large regional farms to reduce dependence on imports.

At the market in the La Saline slum, two cups of rice now sell for 60 cents, up 10 cents from December and 50 percent from a year ago. Beans, condensed milk and fruit have gone up at a similar rate, and even the price of the edible clay has risen over the past year by almost $1.50. Dirt to make 100 cookies now costs $5, the cookie makers say.

Still, at about 5 cents apiece, the cookies are a bargain compared to food staples. About 80 percent of people in Haiti live on less than $2 a day and a tiny elite controls the economy.

Buffy says this makes her feel ashamed. Personally, it makes me angry. Historically, famines are caused by politics more than they are by nature and are generally localized. Politics is a driving force in this famine as well, and its effects could cross many borders.

It’s one thing for us to be inconvenienced by the higher costs and irritated by the short-sighted (at best) or well-meaning evil of the environmentalists and ag-lobbyists — cheered on by a righteous and fawning media — as they lead legislators around by the gold ring they’ve inserted in their noses while everyone in the parade has their hand out and palms up like silk-clad beggars, all while chiding the non-believers for being the blind ones. So what, we pay a bit more for our gas, our groceries, all while our freedom is picked from our pockets. At least we’re not reduced to eating dirt — yet.

It’s all clean and neat here, while thousands of miles away, almost out of sight, real beggars are feeling the true effects of the game. Like cracking a whip, the ripple of these policies curls out almost unnoticed until you get to the end where the lash snaps and falls. Not everyone is blind to what’s going on, however. As I wrote before, Oxfam International has already noted the consequences

“Decisions on biofuels made in Europe are directly affecting millions of people in Indonesia. In the relentless pursuit of biofuel gold, big powerful palm oil companies are callously clearing communities from land they have farmed for generations, workers and small holders are shamefully exploited and we are losing valuable agricultural land to grow the food we need to feed ourselves and make a living. The proposed EU policy will only make this worse – pushing more people into poverty and concentrating land in the hands of a few.”

Additionally, as Wired notes:

Studies Say Biofuels Worse Than Gasoline
When all relevant factors are accounted for, biofuels produce more greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuels.

So conclude two studies published yesterday in Science*, adding to a growing body of research suggesting that crop-based fuels, once hailed as a clean answer to oil, are not a magic green bullet.

Biofuels seemed so promising at first — what could be cleaner than running our cars and factories on plants? But early prognostications were a bit thin on details. They didn’t always account for the energy that would be needed to grow, harvest and refine the fuels. Most importantly, they didn’t consider that greenhouse gas-gobbling vegetation would need to be cleared for fuel crops — or, if these were planted on existing pastures, that new fields would be cleared to make space for displaced food crops.

[*Note: here (funded by the National Science Foundation an the University of Minnesota) and here. NW]

Closer to home, Tom Meersman of the Star Tribune has written a couple of articles recently that pick up on the same information. An excerpt Ethanol: More harm than good (Feb. 7) reports:

But a growing number of scientists are questioning the ecological benefits of biofuels. A policy report last month by the British Royal Society indicated that biofuels have been described as “carbon neutral,” meaning that the carbon they emit to the atmosphere when burned is offset by the carbon that plants absorb from the atmosphere while growing.

The problem is that those benefits assume the world can turn large amounts of crops into biofuels, the report said, without needing to use more land to make up for lost food production. Clearing tropical forests and growing crops on natural peat lands in Malaysia, Indonesia and elsewhere “risk releasing enough greenhouse gases to negate any of the intended future climate benefits,” the report said.

The reason for scientists’ concern, said Tilman, is that soil and plants hold three times more carbon than air. Clearing trees to grow more corn or bulldozing tropical forests to grow more sugarcane emits large amounts of carbon dioxide, either quickly through the burning of the wood, or more gradually through the decomposition of carbon stored in plants and soil.

Tilman calculated that converting natural ecosystems to raise corn or sugarcane for ethanol, or soybeans or palms for biodiesel, will release 17 to 420 times more carbon than the annual savings from replacing fossil fuels. The Minnesota study estimated that in the United States, it will take 93 years for the carbon losses from plowing one acre of healthy grassland to equal the carbon savings from corn-based ethanol produced on that land.

Ethanol industry officials downplay the effects, saying that the process will become more efficient over time and that other organic resources will also be used to take pressure off of fuel crops. I wonder, however, what will replace all the groundwater sucked out of the earth to produce ethanol, as Meersman reported in Is ethanol tapping too much water? (Jan. 28):

With a flood of ethanol plants headed toward Minnesota, there’s growing concern about whether there will be enough groundwater to satisfy the booming industry’s thirst.

The issue was brought into focus last year in Granite Falls, where an ethanol plant in its first year of operations depleted the groundwater so much that it had to begin pumping water from the Minnesota River.

It takes between four and five gallons of water to produce a gallon of ethanol at a biofuel plant, and with 17 ethanol plants now operating in the state, six under construction and 10 more proposed or in the planning stages, the threat of more drains on underground water are rising…

The industry is consuming about 2 billion gallons of groundwater per year, according to state estimates.

That amount could quadruple by 2011 if the state’s ethanol production more than doubles, as expected.

I wonder how many mud pies that much water could make? Finally, another article in Wired, Can’t See the Forest for the Biofuels, makes many of the same points and also notes:

Brazil has designated nearly half a billion acres of forests, grassland and marshes as “degraded” areas suitable for conversion to farming. While the entire Alaska-sized area won’t be cleared, much of it could be planted with soybeans, the staple of that country’s biofuel efforts.

Half a billion acres? That’s 500 million acres in just one country, being sacrificed to “save” the earth. It must be the same scientific reasoning that once said bleeding a patient was a good way to cure him. Meanwhile, 500 million acres is 250,000 times the size of the 2,000 acres (out of 19.5 million) in ANWR considered too precious to allow oil drilling (though those 2,000 acres will yield an assessed 10 billion barrels of oil. Just a little food for thought, especially if you don’t like dirt cookies.

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