Chinese Drop Biofuel Plans as Food Prices Rise
June 12th, 2007Duh.
Via: Times Online:
China’s communist rulers announced a moratorium on the production of ethanol from corn and other food crops yesterday at the very time that Western leaders are rushing to embrace alternative food-based fuel technology.
Beijing’s move underlines concerns that ethanol production is driving up rapidly the costs of corn and grain. It appears to reflect a growing reality about food-based alternative fuel: it is far more expensive both economically and environmentally, than Western politicians are likely to admit.
Calls for biofuels are politically attractive for European and US politicians, amid rising petrol prices and concerns about global warming and an overreliance on Middle Eastern oil.
Communist officials in Beijing, however, who do not have the political concerns of democratically elected leaders in the West, have reacted to a rapid rise in food prices and an intense demand on farm land that threatens to make ethanol production unsustainable.
President Bush, who with Britain wants to see a huge increase in corn-based ethanol, called in January for the annual production of 35 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol in the US.
Although that is a hugely popular rhetoric in the Mid-west wheat belt states — the heart of America’s political battleground — environmentalists soon pointed out that such a goal would require an additional 129,000 square miles of farmland, an area the size of Kansas and Iowa combined.
The rush to corn-based ethanol is causing food-price inflation in the US, as it increases the cost of corn grain feedstock and the availability of the crop for such staples as cereal and corn syrup. The ethanol boom has created mass planting of corn at the expense of other crops, which helps to drive up prices, too. Futures prices for corn in the US have nearly doubled in eight months.
In China grain security has for decades been at the top of the party’s political priority list, and a 43 per cent increase in the price of China’s staple meat — pork — over last year to recent record highs as a result of rapidly rising feed prices is certain to have triggered concern at the highest level of the party.
Xu Dingming, an official of the National Energy Leading Group, told a recent seminar: “Food-based ethanol fuel will not be the direction for China.â€
…because the Chinese, with some 5000 years of collective history, culture, philosophy, science, engineering, agriculture, behind them have the wisdom and common sense to see the folly of such for what it is.
Diabolical, maniac fascist regimes can get it right sometimes. Yep. It’s true.
Hmmmm. Food in the belly or a few cents saved at the pump? What shall it be? Doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out.
Fallout-
Please, let’s leave nationality out of this because that’s completely irrelevant to the process behind these decisions. The American people might buy the biofuels idea, but the Chinese people thought communism was a good idea (and now their recent growth is attributable to their government pushing a more free market- denying communism). Point is, we all get fooled sometimes. We just eat crow and push on.
Anyway the farmers and groups like ADM have every reason to make politicians push the biofuel policy. Government policy forcing consumers to use biofuel pushes up demand for corn. The farmers make a killing, and they probably get a subsidy on top of that. Consequently, diminished supply of corn as a food source increases the price, so the farmers make even MORE money. Corn cannot be produced in enough quantity to both feed and fuel, so farmers get more tax dollars to try and expand while demand sends their profit per bushel of corn rocketing upward.
Giving up the biofuels crusade, unsustainable as it may be, would be like holding a multi-billion dollar check in one’s hands and tearing it up. ADM has “the wisdom and common sense to see the folly of such for what it is.”
. . . or where they supposed to give it all up for altruistic ideals about fellow men and the environment that NOBODY really believes?
So who are the real fools? The ADM executives who could probably buy private islands after this insanity is over? Or you and I who recognize the shortcomings of biofuel, and only chatter like hens about how foolish it is?
This probably has a thing or two to do with the fact that China’s arable land is rapidly turning into desert.
Communism was an is a good idea, at least on a small (village size) scale. Only problem is, no nation on earth has actually practiced it in centuries, and it does not work in the economic macroscale. The PRC is not, and never has been a communist nation.
However, I will concede that we are the fools, for our economic purchasing power is being eroded (nay, stolen) away to line the pockets of the likes of ADM, Cargill, Pacific Ethanol, and farmers destroying their own fields with unsustainable, petrochemical dependent farming methods, at the same time that we are being mollified with fanciful tales of “energy independence” and pay more at the pump (since more corn planted means more petroleum consumed, thanks to the slightly negative EROEI).
Taking that logic to the next step, why bother to read this blog or post here, since it is simply a waste of otherwise useful time and effort?