Let the backlash against biofuels officially begin.

Anyone who has gasped at their grocery bill lately knows that the costs of basics like milk and bread show no signs of leveling off.  The price of milk is up 40% since early 2007, while that of wheat as tripled in recent years.  Some consumers have gotten so panicky about the situation that bulk retailers have put limits on 20-pound bags of rice, fearing a run on their stores.  And many survivalists are taking inventory of their ammunition and canned goods, thinking that this just may be the moment they have been waiting for.

Unsettling times, indeed.  With gas prices at record levels and the economy still reeling from the credit crunch, the situation is looking grim.  Yet despite all this, there is one reason to be thankful: at least we have a grocery bill at which to gasp.

In many parts of the world the food crisis has pushed people beyond the brink.  The average Mexican can no longer afford corn tortillas, a dietary staple, and food riots have broken out from Burkina Faso to Indonesia.  In Haiti, the poster child for perpetual misery, the most destitute have resorted to eating “patties” made from mud, oil, and sugar.

There are, of course, a number of reasons for the food crisis.  Global demand has exploded, particularly in India and China where millions have joined the middle class (and don’t want anything resembling a Haitian diet), while Australia and the Ukraine, two important exporters of wheat, have both suffered through recent crop failures.

However, one cannot overlook the hasty and misguided decision to squeeze corn - bushels of it - into our gas tanks.

One of the first bills to pass during the “100-Hour” plan of the new Democratic Congress was the Energy Independence Act of 2007.  The stated purpose of the act was “to move the United States toward greater energy independence and security, to increase the production of clean renewable fuels, to protect consumers, to increase the efficiency of products, buildings, and vehicles, to promote research on and deploy greenhouse gas capture and storage options, and to improve the energy performance of the Federal Government, and for other purposes.”  (This is classic fluff from congress.  In trying to cover everything from incandescent light bulbs to OPEC, distilled into a mushy paragraph, our legislators wind up saying very little.  And “improving the energy performance of the Federal Government” could be as simple as giving Senator Robert Byrd a Mountain Dew with his lunch.)

The meaningless, if lofty, words aside, one clear impact of the legislation has been the increased use of ethanol at the gas pump.  Nearly 30% of our corn crop goes towards ethanol now and President Bush has proposed that we produce 60 billion gallons of the stuff by 2030. 

That’s a whole lot of corn.  One can almost hear the people of developing nations saying, “Hey! I was going to eat that!”  And many of them essentially have, with leaders of impoverished countries demanding that the West put a halt to biofuel programs.

The situation isn’t much better for industrialized nations: Japan, Korea, and the European Union, who have traditionally turned up their noses at genetically modified crops, are taking another look the issue.  (In Europe, they are referred to as “Frankenfoods.”   Colorful as the term may be, engineered grains are not nearly that sinister: we’re not talking about an ear of corn with some soybeans bolted on to the end.  The goal is to create strains that require less fertilizer and are more resistant to disease and drought – an idea with merit, given current conditions.)

So, hopefully Al Gore and his brethren can forgive us if the thought of submitting our political and economic wills to the pie charts and bar graphs of some UN propellerheads gives us pause.  The world’s economy, imperfect as it may be, is a sensitive machine: one shouldn’t make drastic changes without expecting equally drastic, if unintended, results. 

The ultimate irony is that the many of the same people who excoriate George Bush for rushing to war in Iraq with no plan for the peace are now proposing that we rush to a greener future - with no plan to clean up the inevitable wreckage.  They implore us to “act urgently,” but apparently that entails handing the keys to the global economy over to a blind driver with no idea where he is heading.  The results of that strategy thus far are hardly encouraging and represent a serious indictment of Al Gore’s vague call to arms. 

Because nobody is going to care about a greener tomorrow when they find it difficult to feed themselves today.