And all of it because a bad language interpretation at the end of WWII.
When the Americans, after winning, asked the Germans what they most needed
to avoid starvation, they answered Korn (Rye), which the Americans
interpret to Corn (Maise) and started to send loads of it. The Germans was
very sad about it, not only did they loose the war, but the Americans gave
them animal food to eat. Outside US, Corn is an animal staple feed and is
not normally used by people, this even today. Even poor people do not eat
animal food, if they are not forced to do so.
Why do the Americans stubbornly send animal food to the starving people of
the world and expect them to be grateful about it. In most cases it is
taken as an insult. Except for US, burning Corn, that are not used for
animals, is a great idea. To heavily subsidize production of animal food is
not a great idea and you must be American to do so. Not only that, the
Americans eat the animal food themselves, food which will make the rest of
the world think about pigs and they say that the Americans are rich?! LOL
This has been going on for 60 years now, do not tell me that the Americans
are flexible and understanding.
Hakan
At 03:53 PM 7/25/2005, you wrote:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/072005A.shtml
The Tragic Abuse of Corn
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 20 July 2005
The wheel it has circled, time without end,
Old life remembers, and welcomes the grain.
For the corn and the seed are one and the same,
That which has been, will be again.
-- from Demeter's Hymn by Lyn Hubert
They are exalted for a little while, but are gone and brought low; they
are taken out of the way as all others, and cut off as the tops of the
ears of corn.
-- Job 24:6
It was one of those things that you can't quite believe is real. I was
flipping through a magazine and saw an ad for a stove that burns corn
kernels. For heat. Corn is food, not fuel, I thought, but the ad assured
me that "Corn is replenished annually. It is a never-ending energy
source, and thus is the new alternative fuel of choice."
Something about it felt very wrong to me. Burning food does not seem
respectful. Especially when there are two billion people in the world who
don't get enough to eat.
But it is more than that. Corn production uses tremendous amounts of
fossil fuel for mechanized labor, irrigation, drying, transport and
fertilizer. I sincerely doubted that corn as a fuel could be renewable on
a sustainable basis.
Almost one quarter of America's farmland grows corn - maize. At nine
billion bushels a year, it is our single largest crop and uses vast
amounts of water, pesticides and fertilizer. Erosion and toxic runoff
from the fields pollute waterways and kill fish in the Gulf of Mexico
where a plume of pollution from the Mississippi Delta creates an
ever-expanding dead zone. Raising corn the way we do it today depletes
the soil of nutrients and creates an addiction to nitrogen fertilizer
made from natural gas.
Since natural gas prices went up a few years ago, we are producing
less and less fertilizer here and importing more of it from the Persian
Gulf. Now we must worry about food security as well as energy security.
Burning corn in a stove may seem bizarre, but it is no more bizarre
than fermenting and distilling it into ethanol to burn in our cars. As
gas prices go up, people are looking to ethanol and other biofuels to
substitute for oil. Unfortunately, it is a bad bargain - one that is
being encouraged by giant agribusiness firms like Archer Daniels Midland
and Monsanto that reap huge profits from corn and taxpayer's wallets.
Corn is already America's most heavily subsidized crop, sucking up
about $10 billion a year (according to OXFAM) along with all that water
and fertilizer. About 13 percent of the corn crop is now devoted to
ethanol production, but that would increase dramatically if the Energy
Policy Act of 2005, now in a House-Senate conference committee, were to
pass. The Senate version of the energy bill would require US ethanol
production to more than double - from 3.3 billion gallons in 2004 to 8
billion gallons by 2012.
Subsidies hide the true monetary cost of production, but the big
accounting scandal here is the energy accounting. A study by Cornell
ecologist David Pimentel and UC Berkeley engineer Tad Patzek found that
when all the inputs to farming and ethanol production are accounted for,
ethanol uses 29 percent more fossil fuel energy to produce than it yields
in your gas tank.
This figure does not include the work to restore the soils and
waterways degraded and polluted by industrial agriculture. In a separate
report, Patzek estimated that the energy cost of restoration is seven
times the energy output of the ethanol.
On the global warming front, Patzek found that the corn ethanol
produced in 2004 would generate 11 million more tonnes of CO2 than would
be emitted by burning the equivalent amount of gasoline instead. The best
way to combat global warming would be to retire more farmland and help
restore it to natural grasslands and forests, which are the most
effective sinks for carbon sequestration.
The energy bill title that increases ethanol production is called
"Renewable Content of Motor Vehicle Fuel." It defines "renewable fuel" as
fuel that is produced from grain, starch, etc., that "is used to replace
or reduce the quantity of fossil fuel present in a fuel mixture used to
operate a motor vehicle."
By this definition, ethanol is clearly not a renewable fuel. Not only
does it not replace any of the fossil fuel used to operate a motor
vehicle, it actually increases the quantity of fossil fuel used because
the ethanol embodies so much fossil fuel in its production. We would use
less fossil fuel and produce less greenhouse gas by burning the fossil
fuel directly in the motor vehicle.
John McClelland of the Corn Growers Association, and Michael Graboski
of the Colorado School of Mines, have disputed a previous analysis by
Pimentel. They say Pimentel's figures are outdated; corn output today is
higher and energy inputs are lower than they were a decade ago. But crop
yields are subject to the whims of nature, and with global warming now in
the equation, who can say that yields won't drastically decrease? Or that
more irrigation and more energy won't suddenly be needed?
Last month, the UN reported that one in six countries face food
shortages this year, mostly from drought brought on by global warming.
And it is not just Africa: Spain and Portugal have both applied to the UN
for food assistance.
In any case, Pimentel's new report with Patzek is based on current
data and still reaches the same conclusion - ethanol uses more energy
than it yields. They say investments in solar energy and vehicle fuel
efficiency are where we should put our money.
One output that Pimentel and Patzek do not appear to account for is
the leftover distiller's mash that amounts to about one third of the
original corn weight and retains most of the oil, protein and
micronutrients. This mash is suitable for animal feed. This is helpful,
but more than half of US corn production already goes into the meat
industry, another tragic industry that disrespects our fellow creatures,
destroys land, and promotes an unhealthy, meat-heavy diet.
But the worst abuse of corn, to my mind, is the way the food industry
has crammed High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) into every possible food
product. HCFS is an industrial product that was perfected in the 1970s
and introduced into the food system in the early 1980s. Almost
immediately, Americans started putting on weight, with obesity doubling
by 2000.
Food processors love HFCS because it is cheap (to them, as it is
subsidized by our taxes) and it mixes easily. It also helps baked goods
brown evenly and prevents freezer burn. Consequently it ends up in just
about every processed food product on the market.
HFCS has made headlines for its use in soda and fruit juice. Combined
with a large jump in soda consumption by children, it is implicated in
childhood obesity and skyrocketing rates of diabetes.
HFCS is not a natural product. Corn processors claim it is chemically
identical to cane sugar except for an extra five percent fructose over
glucose content - ordinary cane sugar is 50 percent fructose and 50
percent glucose. But researchers at UC Davis and the University of
Michigan found fructose turns to fat more readily than glucose and it
increases the level of triglycerides in the bloodstream.
HFCS may be only slightly more toxic to the body than cane sugar, but
apparently that is all it takes to manufacture an abysmal health crisis
that is destroying children's health. Last week, the Center for Science
in the Public Interest (CSPI) petitioned the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) to put warning labels on soft drinks containing HFCS. The industry
response was predictable, harping on the rhetoric of "freedom" to attack
the labeling proposal. "This is nothing but another freedom-sucking
proposal from CSPI," said the industry spokeswoman. "The nutrition
nannies are at it again."
About five percent of US corn production now goes into HFCS. To expand
this market, producers are looking toward Mexico, which just lost a WTO
dispute over its attempt to protect its sugar cane production from dirt
cheap HFCS.
Here our corn is being used as a weapon to subjugate the
underdeveloped world, which relies heavily on income from sugar cane.
(Industry has done other terrible things to Mexico's corn producers, the
worst of which may be the genetic pollution of the original strains of
maize, developed over thousands of years and sacred to the Maya, but that
is the subject of another story.)
From where things stand today, it would be better to let the corn
producers divert their product away from poor Mexico and the sweetener
market and into our gas tanks where it will do less harm than it does in
our bodies.
Sooner or later we must face the fact that our agricultural production
systems need a radical overhaul. With far fewer inputs of fossil fuels
and far less damage to the environment, organic agriculture that mimics
natural ecosystems can produce nearly as much food as industrialized
agriculture. In that context, it might make sense to brew up a limited
amount of ethanol to run farm equipment and generators. The kind of
change we need is not a revolution in technology, but a revolution in our
thinking that embraces the practice of sustainability.
To us, sustainability is just another word, but for millennia, the
common man and woman lived it. Corn, as a generic term for all kinds of
grains, was life. The great round of the agricultural year set the meter
of life as the baby seed corn was coaxed to sprout, coddled to maturity
and finally cut down and laid tenderly to rest in the granary, only to
rise again in the spring. In his classic work, The Golden Bough, James
George Frazer documented the rich panoply of ritual and festival
celebrating the "corn mother" ("corn" being that suffused European
peasant culture right up until the 20th century. This pagan "earth
worshipping" culture existed right alongside Christianity because no
peasant could afford to lose the blessing of the corn mother.
The ancient European tradition says that the corn mother, dressed in
white, could be seen at midnight, flying over the fields and fertilizing
them. She would pass by the fields of any farmer who sinned and his corn
would wither and die.
The farms of industrial agriculture are not sustainable. When the
fossil fuels are gone, their corn will wither and die.
If we still believed in the corn mother, and if we could hear her
speak, I believe she would tell us to leave the soda in the can and the
SUV on the showroom floor. She would also recommend that we raise less
corn and more hell.
Kelpie Wilson is the t r u t h o u t environment editor. A veteran
forest protection activist and mechanical engineer, she writes from her
solar-powered cabin in the Siskiyou Mountains of southwest Oregon. Her
first novel, Primal Tears, is forthcoming from North Atlantic Books in
Fall 2005.
_______________________________________________
Biofuel mailing list
Biofuel@sustainablelists.org
http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org
Biofuel at Journey to Forever:
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html
Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages):
http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
_______________________________________________
Biofuel mailing list
Biofuel@sustainablelists.org
http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org
Biofuel at Journey to Forever:
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html
Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages):
http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/