Recent Posts
- East Bound and Down
- Food for Thought
- Back In the Saddle Again
- Hippy Dippy Do
- Paula Scher Rules, Here's Proof
- Lowercase A's and Beyond
- It's the New Style
- February can be pretty good sometimes, right?
- Costa Rica Vids
- Hot Hot / Cold
- Big Ben, Parliament
- Hang the DJ
- Where Do I Start?
- No Comments For You!
- When in Rome, Do the Jerk
- Summer, Where'd You Go?
- 12 Miles!
- New Bike!
- Knows Not What It Means
- Sx Recap
- One Year and Counting
- What a Month
- I Hear That Whistle Blowin
- Your Fork and the Earth
- Weighing in on the Viaduct
Food for Thought
May 09, 2008
No time to put in my two cents on this, but to sum it up, I think it's all pretty ludicrous. There have been a lot of articles in the news recently about the scarcity of corn and rice and the sources for the pinch. In short: biofuels and livestock.
From AlterNet: Perhaps the starkest measure of the car culture's energy appetite is the fact that the state of Iowa, the nation's leading corn producer, will soon be importing corn. If a meteorite were to land randomly in Iowa, there's a 35 percent chance it would land in a cornfield; Iowa's corn harvest last year contained more calories than the state's human population would consume in 85 years of eating; yet Iowa will be hauling corn in from other states. The grain will be fed to a multitude of new fuel-ethanol factories, along with the state's existing corn syrup and livestock industries.
He [Bush] has rejected the Republican lawmakers' call for restraint and blamed food inflation on people in India who, he believes, are eating too much.
From The Seattle Times: Many analysts, including Britain's opposition leader David Cameron, claim that people in the West will need to eat less meat—and consume, or waste, less food in general.
Alex Evans, a former adviser to Britain's Environment Secretary Hilary Benn, said world leaders must help increase food production, rethink their push on biofuels—which many blame for pushing up food prices—and consider anew the once-taboo topic of growing genetically modified crops.
Production of biofuel leads to the destruction of forests and takes up land available to grow crops for food.
Citizens in the West, China and India must realize that the meat on their plate and biofuels in their expensive cars carry a cost for those in the developing world, Evans said.
Another article from The Seattle Times: The owner of the chicken stand said prices had gone up about 25 percent since last fall. Cruz, a housekeeper, said she often substitutes beans for meat to feed her husband and two young children.
"What you have to do is fool your stomach," Cruz said.
Because the price of Mexican corn is formally tied to the price of U.S. corn, the aftershocks are felt here. And much of animal feed comes from yellow corn, which Mexico imports from the U.S.
Mexican agriculture officials estimate that about 30 percent of the country's corn is used as a raw material for food production, such as fattening cattle.
Posted by Aaron on May 9, 2008 01:42 PM| Permalink