Burning ethanol that is derived from edible grains in our cars and trucks is a harebrained, cockamamie and turkey of an idea.
Despite the fact that close to one-quarter of the human population is malnourished and underfed, we continue to allow nourishing grain to be distilled into alcohol and poured in the tanks of our automobiles.
Many of those automobiles are driven by another quarter of the world’s population, who are malnourished and overfed to the point of obesity.
In the United States, more than half of the massive corn crop is turned into ethanol.
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It’s not exactly breaking news that ethanol will never be the great environmentally friendly solution to our fuel crisis it was once hoped to be.
In 2005, a study from ecologists at Cornell University said there is “no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel.”
In other words, you need to use more energy when making plants such as corn into gasoline than you get out of it. The study pointed out that corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced. If you just eat that corn and get down to work, you don’t waste any energy at all.
If we collectively had half a brain in our heads, we’d turn every kernel of grain into human or livestock feed. We would make it a humanitarian and animal welfare right to receive a balanced and nutritious diet that meets the daily needs of all living things on this planet.
Then there would be no undernourished people or domesticated livestock anymore. Instead, you would have a well-nourished and potentially productive workforce as well as an abundance of healthy, useful animals.
This trend of feeding our cars rather than our citizens is having a major impact on agriculture and on its backbone: the farmers who produce the grain.
When farmers were producing food rather than fuel, their conscience guided them to grow only healthful, wholesome grain using traditional, time-honoured methods.
Now that their grain is only going to be used to power an engine, why should they care how it is grown or what its nutritive value might be?
The only criterion for production decisions is what will produce the maximum yield?
That means anything that boosts production is acceptable and even sought after. Previous considerations such as soil degradation, pollution runoff, habitat destruction and species protection all become irrelevant.
Governments at all levels share in the responsibility to stop this shortsighted practice of burning edible feed grain.
They could do this by showing just a little courage in their legislation. Each level must be tasked with offering countervailing incentives to those who grow the grain so that it is used as a food and feed source.
If agriculture is still about taking care of the land and the people who live on it, farmers should be encouraged to grow food for living things and not for cars and trucks.
Drury is the former president of the Quebec Farmers’ Association. His column was originally printed in the Quebec Farmers’ Advocate.
