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COMMENTARY
March 12, 2008
Famine watch
A few weeks ago I wrote in this space -- facetiously -- that an effective response to global warming and/or the atmospheric accumulation of carbon dioxide would be to cut the world’s food consumption by half. This could be achieved if we would all agree to eat only on odd-numbered days. Among the advantages of having our environmental commissars enforce this scheme, I mentioned the halving of the factory and transport infrastructure, that delivers the planet’s food. But beyond this, the food industry’s billion or so poorest customers, who barely get enough to eat now, would be removed from the carbon account entirely. Think of it on the analogy of a corporate buy-out, I suggested:rn rn“At first, there is a net increase in CO2 ‘costs’ as people die and their corpses decay. But later, after they have finished decaying, there are substantial and permanent net savings.” Perhaps I shouldn’t joke. A scheme to kill off the world’s poor, through starvation, has already been launched on the advice of environmental “experts,” and is showing promising results. The tactics are cleverer than mine, by half. “Biofuel” is the means. By turning much of the planet’s limited arable land, including especially the lower-cost breadbaskets of the Third World, into grain generators for biofuel, the environmental revolution is creating the conditions for famine on a colossal scale. Thanks to massive First-World subsides for biofuel, and state regulations requiring constant increases in the biofuel component of Western oil consumption, the tonnage of the world’s crops being fed into biofuel production appears, from various estimates, to be growing about five times faster than the amount being fed into human mouths. The turnover is accelerating. Even in the economically advanced West, the rise in food prices has become noticeable. My observant reader will find plenty of signs in his local supermarket, where the price of dairy products is leading an advance that must necessarily spread -- for wholesale prices are outstripping retail prices in food across the board. The secondary effect of the monetary inflation this re-ignites is in itself beginning to cause economic havoc. But we, who spend (in North America) less than 15 percent of our income on food, can nevertheless survive if that proportion doubles or triples. It is in the poorest countries of the world, where people often spend more than half their income obtaining food, that a doubling or tripling of prices is fatal. And note, the supply of food does not need to halve, in order to double prices. It only has to fall, consistently, a little behind demand. Please don’t take my word for this. The United Nations’ World Food Programme and various other collectivist agencies are already becoming eloquent on the subject. In a statement to the European Parliament last week, the executive director of the WFP explained that their own cost of obtaining food for distribution to the world’s hungry had risen by 40 percent since last June. They are not predicting a catastrophe. They are experiencing one. And all this is happening for what? So that we, the rich, can feel some smug environmentalist satisfaction while pumping biofuel into our cars. The economics of biofuel are themselves distorted by subsidies representing around half of production costs. It is a way of producing petroleum that is structurally more expensive than refining oil, not only in cash, but in environmental fallout -- for there are more production stages to be passed through, and fossil fuels are burned in passing through them. Cheap gas we are not going to get. The world’s oil prices have much more to do with the OPEC cartel than any shortage of reserves or supply. Huge new reservoirs have come to light (most recently off the coast of Brazil), and there were already huge unexploited reserves (such as Alberta’s tar sands). But by consistently choking down supply, a fraction behind growth in demand, OPEC can keep the whip hand for the foreseeable future. Biofuel has thus already joined the list of environmental catastrophes caused by environmental scares. That list began with the DDT scare in the early 1960s, since when tens of millions have died from malaria and other diseases that could have been eradicated by spraying with this effective pesticide. The triumph of “environmentalism” is symptomatic of the madness that has gripped our power elites, under the thrall of “political correctness” -- for there is real insanity in creating an actual and predictable disaster, to avert an imaginary one. Noting food riots already in Egypt, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Mexico, and food rationing in Pakistan and China, the Indian development economist Deepak Lal writes: “For the Western ‘good and the great’, their academic acolytes and the pop stars grandstanding to save Africa and to end poverty, this latest Western assault on the world's poor by their promotion of biofuels to replace food on the limited land in the world, can only evince contempt.” David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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