Politics and hunger

According to the Wall Street Journal, global food prices have risen over 80% in the past 3 years. Citizens of the bottom billion countries spend over 60% of their income on food. That amounts to trouble. And indeed recently there have been ‘food riots’ in these countries, not to speak of starvation and the continuing crisis of world poverty.

As spelled out in several major newspapers here and here, food shortages are the result of multiple causes: recent droughts in Australia, Morroco and S. Africa and poor conditions in other important agricultural areas, escalating prices for oil, fertilizer and seed, and increased demand from emerging economies like India and China. In addition to these, many foreign ministers are pointing towards a political cause: the U.S. ethanol biofuel policy. The U.S. mandates that by the year 2017, 15% of road fuel used in this country come from ethanol. It subsidizes corn farmers for this. Sounds relatively harmless and perhaps even beneficial for the environment, except for the fact that corn isn’t the most efficient product to convert into ethanol, sugar cane is. In the face of that, what is our response? This: sugar cane ethanol imports into the U.S. (primarily from Brazil) are taxed to the tune of 25%. In addition to that economic puzzle, diverting corn to fuel production raises world corn prices (the U.S. is responsible for 50% of the world’s corn production).

Showing his sensitivity to the situation, Senator Charles E. Grassley (R-IO) (as quoted in the New York Times) “called the recent criticism of ethanol by foreign officials ‘a big joke.’ He questioned why they were not also blaming a drought in Australia that reduced the wheat crop and the growing demand for meat in China and India.

'You make ethanol out of corn,' he said. ‘I bet if I set a bushel of corn in front of any of those delegates, not one of them would eat it.’”

Evidently, Grassley can’t distinguish natural causes from political ones, and rich delegates from the world's poor. One could blame droughts in one sense (as a causal contributor), but not in the moral sense (moral blame), as one can with political shenanigans. Clearly, he has a political agenda to push, and I don’t know the merits of that agenda to judge, but to perversely suggest that corn is primarily a fuel product and not a food one--that is the big joke, one for which the world's poor are paying the price.