How government policy can push more than 100 million people below the extreme poverty line
Children of the Corn: The Renewable Fuels Disaster
By Aaron Smith
Wednesday, January 4, 2012Deficit hawks, environmentalists, and food processors are celebrating the expiration of the ethanol tax credit. This corporate handout gave $0.45 to ethanol producers for every gallon they produced and cost taxpayers $6 billion in 2011. So why did the powerful corn ethanol lobby let it expire without an apparent fight? The answer lies in legislation known as the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which creates government-guaranteed demand that keeps corn prices high and generates massive farm profits. Removing the tax credit but keeping the RFS is like scraping a little frosting from the ethanol-boondoggle cake.
The RFS mandates that at least 37 percent of the 2011-12 corn crop be converted to ethanol and blended with the gasoline that powers our cars. The ethanol mandate is causing corn demand to outstrip supply by more and more each year, creating a vulnerable market in which even the slightest production disturbance will have devastating consequences for the world’s poor. It is time for the federal government to stop requiring cars to burn food. (The American)
this is science insannity at its worst
This is a classic example of unintended consequences flowing from a meddling government’s commitment to the global warming religion. As the referenced story says, the price increase of grain will not affect the supermarket price of cornflakes in the US. But any increase in extreme poverty will surely lead to shortened lives in the third world. So I wonder just how many deaths this ethanol mandate policy will bring about? I couldn’t help thinking of a parallel with the unintended consequences of past DDT legislation in the US… A case where committed believers legislated a change for the holy environment but caused many, many unnecessary third world deaths.