[Peakoil] Supermarkets and Service Stations Now Competing for Grain

[Adrian Whitehead]

July 13, 2006-5

Copyright © 2006 Earth Policy Institute

Supermarkets and Service Stations Now Competing for Grain

Lester R. Brown

Cars, not people, will claim most of the increase in world grain consumption
this year. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that world grain use
will grow by 20 million tons in 2006. Of this, 14 million tons will be used
to produce fuel for cars in the United States, leaving only 6 million tons
to satisfy the world’s growing food needs.

In agricultural terms, the world appetite for automotive fuel is insatiable.
The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol will feed
one person for a year. The grain to fill the tank every two weeks over a
year will feed 26 people. 

Investors are jumping on the highly profitable biofuel-bandwagon so fast
that hardly a day goes by without another ethanol distillery or biodiesel
refinery being announced somewhere in the world. The amount of corn used in
U.S. ethanol distilleries has tripled in five years, jumping from 18 million
tons in 2001 to an estimated 55 million tons from the 2006 crop.

In some U.S. Corn Belt states, ethanol distilleries are taking over the corn
supply. In Iowa, a staggering 55 ethanol plants are operating or have been
proposed. Iowa State University economist Bob Wisner observes that if all
these plants are built, they would use virtually all the corn grown in Iowa.
In South Dakota, a top-ten corn-growing state, ethanol distilleries are
already claiming over half of the corn harvest.

With so many distilleries being built, livestock and poultry producers fear
there may not be enough corn to produce meat, milk, and eggs. And since the
United States supplies 70 percent of world corn exports, corn-importing
countries are worried about their supply.....

Full article

http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2006/Update55.htm

 
Adrian Whitehead
Water & Climate Campaigner
Conservation Council of the SE Region and Canberra
P: 6247 7808
F: 6248 5343
M: 0403 735 118

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