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Food FightThe case for turning crops into fuel.

By William SaletanPosted Saturday, July 7, 2007, at 7:32 AM ET

Just when you thought George W. Bush and Fidel Castro were dead—one politically, the other literally—they're back at it. Their new fight is about biofuel, the conversion of living things into liquid energy. One president says it's an assault on nature and humanity. The other says it's an agricultural revolution that will liberate the masses. Bush is the revolutionary. Castro is the reactionary.

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Bush has been evangelizing for biofuel since he lost control of Congress last year. Castro has been attacking it since he returned from surgery this spring. "Transforming food into fuels is a monstrosity," Castro wrote two months ago in a series of angry essays. He said it would devour the world's food supply, "killing the poor masses through hunger."

Castro's argument has gained widespread support. The Economist declared (subscription required) that "Castro was right" and faulted Bush's "unhealthy enthusiasm for ethanol." Foreign Affairs published a long article titled, "How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor." On July 4, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that "increased demand for bio-fuels … could drive up world prices for many farm products." In a visit to Havana, the director of the U.N. Environment Program echoed Castro's concerns.

The critics are right about several things. Corn-based ethanol isn't very economical or environmentally helpful. It inflates food prices, and it's propped up by foolish subsidies and tariffs. But to write off biofuel is to miss the forest for the trees—or, in this case, the grassland for the corn. Enthusiasm for ethanol isn't the problem. It's the solution.

Biofuel is our next logical technology. We've had an agricultural revolution, an industrial revolution, and an information technology revolution. Now, we're putting them together to harness the power of life. Ecologically, it's ideal: a fuel that literally grows on trees.

But biofuel has aroused the same fears as free trade, with a twist. The argument against free trade was that people in poor countries would underbid and take jobs from people in rich countries. The argument against biofuel is that people in rich countries will outbid and take food from people in poor countries. The old buzzword was job security. The new buzzword is "food security."

What critics of free trade forget is that people in rich countries aren't just producers; they're consumers: Competition from poor countries drives down wages but compensates by lowering prices. Conversely, what critics of biofuel forget is that people in poor countries aren't just consumers; they're producers. Crop purchases by rich countries drive up prices but compensate by driving up incomes. Castro says turning food into fuel is a "waste," but that's not true. Fuel helps make food available and affordable.

Castro thinks the very idea of making fuel from food is "diabolical." But using food for fuel wasn't Satan's idea. It was God's. Fuel is the whole point of food. That's why edible crops such as corn and cassava are also easy ethanol sources: They're loaded with energy-bearing starch.

Biofuel doesn't feed people directly. But we've been diverting food from direct human consumption since we domesticated animals. Most of the corn we export today feeds livestock, not people. Two months ago, a U.N. report calculated that one-third of the increased demand for food over the next 30 years will come from people shifting their eating habits to meat and dairy—a net loss of dietary efficiency—as they become able to afford it. I don't see Castro complaining about that diversion. In fact, he worries that biofuel is taking land from "producers of beef cattle." Evidently, he's suffering an irony deficiency.

Castro says Bush insists that biofuels "must be extracted from foods." That's false. Bush points out that corn is an inefficient ethanol source. In its place, Bush touts sugar cane, wood chips, and switchgrass. Such "cellulosic" ethanol could lower the output of greenhouse gases and deliver up to six times as much energy as its production requires.

If you want to help poor people, biofuel beats the heck out of oil. In a biofuel economy, the chief asset is open land. Who has open land? Poor countries. Latin America has sugar cane. Africa and Asia have cassava. Switchgrass, which grows in dry regions, will level the playing field further. Bush says switchgrass will empower the Western United States. That's nice, but the real story is that it'll empower the Southern Hemisphere.

What makes Castro and other radicals so conservative about biofuel? The same thing that troubles Bush about human embryo research: the industrialization of biology. For the right, the chief concern is humanity. For the left, it's nature. That's why Castro worries that genetic crop modifications by ethanol conglomerates will unleash "transgenetic contamination" and put "food production at risk."

True, biotechnology can go wrong. But it can also go wonderfully right. Scientists are learning to split corn so it can make ethanol and still feed animals. We're studying the use of microbes to extract fuel from straw and wood waste. We're trying to grow biofuel in algae. We're even learning to make fuel from animal fat and excrement.

Yes, ethanol subsidies are a scam. Yes, we should drop our trade barriers and let Brazilian sugar cane wipe out American corn. Yes, we need solar power, conservation, and efficiency. But don't give up on biofuel. It just needs time to grow.

A version of this article also appears in the Outlook section of the Sunday Washington Post.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. Follow him on Twitter here.

Illustration by Rob Donnelly.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

The author has clearly missed the key problems with biofuels. While he does point out that they have limited environmental benefit (the amount of CO2 released during the production and use of ethanol is similar to that of gasoline), he doesn't realize that biofuels will be an ecological disaster. If the price of crops increases, it will not be cattle farming land that will be used to produce these crops. Instead poor farmers will burn/chop down more forests to increase available land. In addition, much of the "open" land he refers to is unsuitable for large scale farming and using it will result in destruction of the top soil.

However, the biggest problem with biofuels is that even if 20% of crops were to be used for biofuel, they would meet less than 5% of American energy needs.

Someone needs to tell politicians that they need to stop ethanol subsidies before they distort the whole global food market.

--apechi

(To reply, click here.)

The oil industry has an amazing PR team. They have been able to get environmentalists to carry their torch for them, with a few carefully planted stories and "studies" about rising food prices and alleged net energy losses from ethanol. Their campaign of fear, uncertainty, and doubt should be in marketing and psychology textbooks for decades.

They first financed a report by a couple of college professors that said producing ethanol consumed more energy from petroleum than it created. This was false. It was based on old (maybe three decades) technology, and ignores the equivalent cost of finding oil and removing it from the ground (or from under oceans) and converting it into fuel. Without going into a deep cost analysis, it is easy to see how flawed this premise is. The cost of making ethanol is about $1.25- $1.75 per gallon, depending on the feedstock (corn, sugar cane, etc.). Ethanol has about 70% of the energy of gasoline, so that means it costs about $2 to make the equivalent amount of gasoline energy. To produce ethanol, you need to pay for land, labor, water, seeds, and then the fuel and petro-based fertilizer and pesticides. You can't get oil and the derivative products for $2 per gallon, and even if you did, you still have to pay for all of the other resources required to produce it, and those people don't work for free. No, it's more likely that ethanol (even if produced by inefficient corn) still produces more than twice the energy it consumes, which is a net plus, given all of the other advantages (less pollution, less oil imports, lower trade deficit).

The fear that is being instilled about biofuels causing food prices to increase is classical. The price of corn has increased, from about $2 per bushel to about $4. Yes, that sounds like a lot, but the cost of food is largely unrelated to the cost of corn. A lot has been made of the price of corn flour, but there are about 40 pounds of corn flour produced from a bushel of corn. That means the cost of corn used in making corn meal has gone from about five cents per pound to ten cents per pound. Any increased beyond ten cents per pound are due solely to companies taking advantage of the hysteria (i.e., gouging).

If the price of corn does continue to go up, it will be great for the health of the average American. Since the advent of the widespread use of corn syrup as a sweetener, the incidence of diabetes has greatly increased. The body does not react to corn sweetener like it does to sugar, and stores it as fat, which is one big reason why there are so many more obese people today than 25 years ago. If the price of corn syrup goes up enough, it will be less expensive to use sugar. Unless, of course, the farm lobby gets congress to increase tariffs on sugar even further.

And I haven't even mentioned the benefits of biodiesel...

--kgsbca

(To reply, click here.)

Why screw around with ethanol?

We can use genetic hybridization to create a stem-cell propagated variant of a whale heart which will live in a solution inside the engine compartment of my car, providing a sugar-fueled hydraulic engine that is both emissions free and which, when worn out, can be recycled into pet food or used to make fajitas.

The only "downside" is that sugar will become so expensive that soft-drinks and candy are no longer affordable, thus arresting the childhood obesity/diabetes epidemic, improving life spans while simultaneously lowering health care costs. Medicaid dental plans alone save so much money that they are reinstated in all states who've previously cut them. Prescription rates for psychiatric meds for both children and adults will plummet, as researchers finally determine they've actually been providing symptomatic treatment for chronic hypoglycemia all this time. As the technology is tasked to other uses, emissions continue to fall to such low levels that global warming is arrested. Lung disease not attributable to smoking is nearly eradicated.

See? Everybody wins. So get on it, people! I'll be waiting for my royalty checks.

--TenaciousK

(To reply, click here.)

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