I heard this morning that milk prices are rising this Summer, due to higher demand for corn as ethanol feedstock.  Experts worldwide predicted it, and now the impacts of this disastrous act of the Big Ag branch of the Corporate Oligarchy will be felt mostly on the poor.  All in the name of Greed.

David
Sustainability For Life

Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!

U.S. taxpayers are, in effect, subsidizing the Gulf of Mexico's dead zone, an area of coastal waters where dissolved-oxygen concentrations fall to less than 2 parts per million every summer, according to a paper ["Spring Nitrate Flux in the Mississippi River Basin: A Landscape Model with Conservation Applications", by Mary S. Booth and Chris Campbell] published last Wednesday on ES&T's website (subscription required). These findings don't bode well for the Gulf, as more and more acres of land are planted with corn to meet the growing U.S. demand for alternative fuels.

Moreover,

Scientists studying nutrient inputs that feed the Gulf's hypoxic zone have known that certain intensively farmed areas in the upper Midwest leak more nitrogen derived from fertilizers than others. Now, there's a new twist. Farmers in areas with the highest rates of fertilizer runoff tend to receive the biggest payouts in federal crop subsidies, says Mary Booth, lead author of the paper and a former senior scientist with the Environmental Working Group. What's more, they have fewer acres enrolled in conservation programs compared with other parts of the Mississippi River basin. [My emphasis]

It is a disease for pigs. Recently, many pigs in China died of the so-called blue ear disease. So, the Chinese Communist Party has just stopped all the plans for enthanol production cause they now need the corn for feeding pigs so that the price of pork will not skyrocket.

This is complicated by the other problem, namely, many farmers in China would rather grow apples and other kinds of cash crops than to grow cheap food items such as corn and rice.

Yeah, ethanol is a renewable fuel. But so what? The world has an X amount of land and the food problem will only become more serious in the future.

Until some crazy scientists figure out some good ways to increase the productivity per acre of land, using scarce land to produce fuel for rich kids to drive their new-generation ethanol-driven Ferrari will only make more and more poor kids die in hunger!

freehk.org | chinasick.blogspot.com | noolympics.blogspot.com

Ethanolics Anonymous
By DENNY HALDEMAN

. . .

While some crops are superior to others and forest eating cellulostic ethanol technology scams are still in development, corn ethanol primacy is devouring the nation's alternative energy focus. Billions of taxpayer dollars are being thrown into this unsustainable technology and we subsidize each gallon of auto alcohol to the tune of 51 cents per gallon. The ethanol fumes are leaving us drunk on delusion, ignoring the consequences and refusing to face the future when the oil dries up.

the complete essay can be found at
http://www.counterpunch.org/haldeman06262007.html

bernardo issel - http://www.NonprofitWatch.org - bernardo (at) NonprofitWatch.org

This paper, "Quantifying and mapping the human appropriation of net primary production in the Earth's terrestrial ecosystems", is about to be published by the National Academy of Sciences.
http://www.pnas.org/misc/highlights.shtml#Humans

The full paper is available online now.

From the lay synopsis:

Measuring human appropriation of net primary production, the aggregate impact of land use on biomass available each year in ecosystems, is one way to quantify the effect that human dominance has on the biosphere. Human land use, such as planting crops, or harvesting, such as clearing forests, alters patterns and pathways of carbon captured by photosynthesis. A recent analysis by Helmut Haberl et al. shows that humans appropriate almost a quarter of the Earth's photosynthetic production capacity in this way. Haberl et al. analyzed data on human land use and harvests from 161 countries, which represent 97% of the Earth's landmass. The results showed that humans appropriated 24% of the Earth's potential production. Over half of the impact is attributable to harvesting crops or other plants. According to the authors, no other single species has such a large impact on the Earth's production. The authors caution that, with such an already high human pressure on ecosystems, schemes to replace fossil fuels with biomass fuels should be approached cautiously given their ability to impact the biosphere further.

Full paper here: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0704243104v1