Killing Brown People
Kim du Toit
April 8, 2008
10:00 AM EDT
· General
DDT = bad. Result: poor brown people die of disease. (No excerpt—we all know the results.)
Oil = bad; ethanol = good. Result: poor brown people die of starvation.
We drive, they starve. The mass diversion of the North American grain harvest into ethanol plants for fuel is reaching its political and moral limits.
“The reality is that people are dying already,” said Jacques Diouf, of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). “Naturally people won’t be sitting dying of starvation, they will react,” he said.
The UN says it takes 232kg of corn to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol. That is enough to feed a child for a year. Last week, the UN predicted “massacres” unless the biofuel policy is halted.
We are all part of this drama whether we fill up with petrol or ethanol. The substitution effect across global markets makes the two morally identical.
Mr Diouf says world grain stocks have fallen to a quarter-century low of 5m tonnes, rations for eight to 12 weeks. America - the world’s food superpower - will divert 18pc of its grain output for ethanol this year, chiefly to break dependency on oil imports. It has a 45pc biofuel target for corn by 2015.
Even the NYT weighs in with a doubtful look. (I should point out, by the way, that the last couple of paragaphs in the NYT article are arrant nonsense. Even if some of the starvation is caused by food shortages of non-biofuel grains like rice and wheat, the diversion of corn into ethanol means that there’s little left for relief supplies.)
So that’s two (and counting) initiatives caused by the Green movement which have, quite simply, caused people to die unnecessarily.
And they’re the ones who no doubt feel morally superior.
