the road to Green Hell is paved with yellow corn?

Sorry for the long url here, but you can't know what's being referred to in this post unless you watched this testimony. Here's the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress having a hearing on food prices:

http://jec.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Hearings.HearingsCalendar&ContentRecord_id=a092ba11-fffc-7fd5-9312-644bbe74704c

This was very entertaining to watch. Farm trade group lobbyist (Buis) goes after oil companies and denies the ethanol push is a big deal, denies corn takes acreage away from wheat or rice etc. (ask a tofu maker, they'll tell you corn acreage certainly does compete with soy). Bakery man (Reinwald) tells committee that he has heard that GMO corn is taking wheat land because it is more hardy and being planted further north now, and he insists the congress revisit ethanol mandates and find a "balance." Farm state senator (Brownback) says wheat acreage mostly doesn't compete with corn and so it's no biggie, no worries.

Some really odd positions are being maintained here. Watch as they either crumble or get clung to with ever-more-desperate rationalizing over time. Several on the committee (including Sununu and Brady) seemed to believe that diverting 25 or 30 percent of the US corn crop (yellow corn [?], thanks Buis) into gas tanks was an issue, but that what it meant was the US needs to drill for oil in the arctic. Brady thinks we should keep up with the biofuel and drill. Several on the committee suggested the US import ( repeat, import ) more ethanol rather than continue to mandate the growing of it in the US. Oh so endearing how they try to be so helpful, shifting domestic problems to foreign populations, how well-meaning of them, our beloved representatives and these death sentences they so nonchalantly and dispassionately propose... Brownback of all people one would expect to know better than this, but republican doctrine and farm-state loyalty can apparently blind even the most ardent humanitarian to the chaos they are touching off. With all this discussion around these food issues though, the most fundamental problems are still being rigorously avoided.

They'll do anything but ask Americans to change their behavior. Anything but say bluntly and honestly that we need to learn to live in a world without cheap energy. As unthinkable and unspeakable as it sounds to many in May 2008 (actually a UN and peer-reviewed scientists just put out a major report in April saying all this - needless to say it was promptly ignored and forgotten), it will of course become increasingly more obvious as time goes by, we will need to retrofit cities, we and all nations and peoples will need to grow our own food, as much as possible less oil-intensively, domestically and locally. Whether we want to or not, we are going to have to end all the "food miles" our daily bread travels, whatever controversy there is about the "greenness" of economies of scale and carbon savings entailed by such systems of distribution. Our chemical dependency in agriculture will come to an end, as will the age of throwaway plastics and other things you have in your trash can right now. These are elementary facts any kid can see, and all clearly contained in the concepts "non renewable" and "un sustainable." Expensive petroleum is only one of the reasons things will change. But the fact is, this resource-devouring system cannot go on forever, and that is a hard truth to accept for anybody, but the hardest fighers for squeezing the system to its last drop, it seems are the "Hard Greens" (more on them in later posts). The rationalizations used to argue in its favor get more and more self-contradictory.

Besides calling off the whole ethanol mad-crowd-tulip-speculation frenzy, we need to initiate a dead-serious movement to eliminate petroleum "inputs" in our agriculture. The committee (specifically Klobuchar, farm state rep.) brought up high oil prices when discussing farmers' "input costs" several times, but only in the context of keeping diesel prices low for combines and tractors and product distribution vehicles (keeping large agribusiness commercial farming cost-effective and profitable), meaning, "yes we should amend our fuel with cellulosic ethanol or imported palm oil, and we should continue depending on fertilizer made from un-renewable natural gas as if it were renewable." Worst of both worlds. To their credit, everybody remembered that fertilizer costs are up because they are made with un unrenewable resource (maybe they read the Times. It had a story the same day about high fertilizer costs). They just conveniently forget the implications. In the discourse of political economy in the US, nobody is allowed to think that drastic change and monumental new political will could possibly be necessary to deal with these challenges we face. They are so very Fabian about things...

It sounds like cellulosic ethanol and non-food biodiesel crops (especially if both are imported) still seem like a win-win to these committee members, but these people need to take a lesson from the corn ethanol craze (thanks for the term, Ban Ki-Moon) and contain their enthusiasm while they do some research. Can you imagine how funny their discourse would look from the position of a subsistence farmer (as opposed to commercial or cash-cropping farmer) in Swaziland or India or Thailand or Malaysia or Indonesia or the Philippines who has had their food-growing land confiscated with zero compensation so that some company could grow and inedible biofuel feedstock there to export to the United States? Can you imagine being in that position yourself? How would you feel?

It bears repeating over and over how tragic it is what happens to the subsistence farmer as oil companies and agribusiness companies cash in on all the free land concessions (costs externalized to those evicted of course) provided by "developing nation" governments in exchange for the companies' highly valued "investment" money, as the companies get to claim that they have offset carbon by creating these plantations of "clean alternative fuel" which they call "carbon sinks" (Remember this all allows the companies to literally get away with murder while nearly everyone back home where they are incorporated thinks they are such great global citizens).

How would you feel if you were the dispossessed farmer whose rice lands got "eminent-domained" by the government and the company, who ends up homeless, in a slum or squatter camp or "reserve," you and your family being pushed around from place to place, starving, while rice is being exported from your nation to wealthier countries? Or while your old land is sending its fruits, in the form of some biofuel feedstock like palm or jatropha, to the Americans? What would that feel like? What would you feel like doing to the people who took your land if you could identify those responsible? Remember how the Joad family reacted to the landlord coming to evict them in The Grapes of Wrath? "Who do we shoot?"