Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Give us this day our daily bread

And stop making corn for ethanol:
Wheat prices have hit record highs and tight supplies of the staple crop have ignited concern about rising food costs.

The price of higher-quality spring wheat jumped almost 25% on Monday - the biggest one-day increase to date.

The rise comes as the UN's World Food Programme warns that it will have to start cutting rations or feeding fewer people if it does not get more money to cope with the higher cost of food.
The article goes on to list export curbs, drought, land for biofuels, growing demand, and speculation by investors as reasons for the climbing prices.

The US could help by acknowledging that ethanol is a ridiculous choice for a biofuel, inefficient in the extreme. The ruin of the water aquifers, the enlarging dead zones from fertilizer overuse, the extra pollution ethanol releases into the atmosphere, the loss of farm land to the mega-agriculture corporations, the infiltration into all our food of corn and corn byproducts, all this could be cut back by trying for another type of more efficient biofuel.

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