Andrew Heintzman - Food and Fuel: Solutions for the Future

FOOD
AND
FUEL

Solutions for the Future

EDITED BY
Andrew Heintzman and
Evan Solomon
FOREWORD BY
Eric Schlosser

Copyright 2003, 2004, 2009 Realize Media

Foreword and individual chapter copyright 2003, 2004, 2009 their respective contributors

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Essays that appear in the Food section of this volume were originally published in hardcover in 2004 and in paperback in 2006 by House of Anansi Press Inc. under the title Feeding the Future: From Fat to Famine, How to Solve the Worlds Food Crises.

Essays that appear in the Fuel section of this volume were originally published in hardcover in 2003 and in paperback in 2005 by House of Anansi Press Inc. under the title Fueling the Future: How the Battle Over Energy Is Changing Everything.

This edition published in 2009 by
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Food and fuel : solutions for the future / edited by Andrew Heintzman and Evan Solomon.

ISBN 978-0-88784-826-1

1. Food supply. 2. Famines Prevention. 3. Agricultural innovations. 4. Sustainable agriculture. 5. Power resources. 6. Energy development Technological innovations. 7. Renewable energy sources. 8. Fuel. I. Heintzman, Andrew, 1967 II. Solomon, Evan, 1968

HD9000.5.F645 2009 363.8 C2008-906017-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008937048

Cover design: Paul Hodgson
Text design and typesetting: Sari Naworynski

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Printed and bound in Canada

The evidence is right in front of us, spread out over thousands of kilometres. Still, no one can say definitively what it is. Is it a kind of energy? Or a food? It is a mystery that goes back over a hundred years. On June 4, 1896, a thirty-two-year-old engineer working in a tiny shed in Dearborn, Michigan, used it to power a spectacular invention. Since that moment it has, in one way or another, determined the lives of billions of people, been the cause of wars and prosperity, and now, many believe, it might determine the very fate of the planet itself. It is not just food. It is not just energy. It is, amazingly, both. Yellow gold. Corn. The crop that feeds the world. And one that might fuel the world as well.

Henry Ford, that young engineer in Dearborn, knew all about the profound connection between food and fuel. After all, he came from a farm, but loathed the back-breaking rural life. He preferred to tinker with machines, like taking apart and putting back together his fathers watch. As soon as he could, Ford bolted for the big city of Detroit, where he found work at the Edison Illuminating Company. There he met Thomas Edison himself, who, in an historic moment, personally encouraged Ford to keep noodling on the invention Ford called the Quadricycle. The Quadricycle was a motorized carriage Ford built in the cramped quarters of the shed behind his modest little house, where he and his wife and son lived. Four bicycle tires supported a wooden carriage, and a tiller was used to steer. That was the simple part. The key to the contraption was the fuel. Ford powered his combustion engine with the fuel of the day, ethanol. It was, ironically, made from the very crop grown on the farms Ford so hated: corn.

In other words, the dawn of the mass production of cars and the mass production of food were intimately intertwined, and have remained that way since. By 1906, Ford founded his own automobile company and that year, when Congress finally repealed the liquor tax, he announced that ethanol was the fuel of the future. His famous Model T was the first flex-fuel car, designed to run on a mixture of gasoline and ethanol, very much like the cars coming off the Ford plant in Dearborn today.

A century later, Henry Fords ethanol revolution is actually happening. The record-high, volatile oil prices, combined with concerns over energy security and climate change, have made ethanol once again a popular fuel. Politicians of all stripes, including President Barack Obama, are open supporters of the idea that America can grow its energy. After all, ethanol means votes. In Iowa alone a key state in every U.S. presidential primary season over 50,000 jobs are dependent on the biofuel business. Governments around the world have followed suit, aggressively setting targets for increasing the percentage of ethanol mixtures in automotive fuel. (In Brazil, 30 percent of the cars run on a sugar canebased ethanol, which is actually more efficient than corn-based ethanol.) These targets come with huge subsidies. In the U.S. the biofuel industry received government subsidies of over $8 billion a year, which has kick-started the ethanol industry explosion. Private investment in ethanol is expected to reach $100 billion by 2010 in the U.S. alone.

But there are serious questions about using food as fuel, especially the so-called yellow gold. It turns out it requires almost as much energy to produce a barrel of corn-based ethanol as one can derive from it. On the climate front, the math is even worse. Depending on the processing method, corn-based ethanol can emit more greenhouse gas emissions than a similar quantity of conventional oil. In the developing world, the turn to biofuels has another devastating effect. Converting huge tracts of land to the production of corn and sugar cane in places like Indonesia or the Amazon basin in Brazil is an environmental catastrophe. Biodiversity has been sharply reduced, and vast and valuable carbon sinks of rainforest have been eliminated. Clearly, industrializing agriculture is not an effective, long-term strategy to combat climate change.

However, the impact of the biofuel industry is felt most dramatically at the grocery store, not at the gas station. When the appetite for biofuel grows, so does the price of staple foods. It is not surprising that in 2008, when the price of oil approached $150 a barrel and the price of natural gas shot up to record highs, the price of food also skyrocketed. The amount of grain it takes to make enough ethanol to fill the tank of a single car could feed a person for a year. In a world where over 800 million people are starving, the relationship between food and fuel is not an abstract economic issue. Last year, we witnessed some more remarkable illustrations of this: there were riots in Mexico over the price of flour, which is needed for the diet staple of tortilla; protests in Italy over pasta and in France over bread; uprisings in Pakistan, Cameroon, and Haiti over basic food needs. In the last year alone, the cost of making bread around the world has doubled. When food prices rise, the one billion people in the world who spend 90 percent of their income on food suffer. That makes for one very expensive tank of environmentally friendly gas.