The true cost of ethanol from corn

Published by Brian on 25 March 2007 at 1:00 am

The ancient Mayans believed they were created by gods who mixed their blood with ground corn. They called themselves “Children of the Corn,” a phrase Mexicans still sometimes use to describe themselves.

Corn, it seems, is not just a staple food for 107 million Mexicans, it is part of their culture. You might say it is part of the fabric of their being. Poor Mexicans (40% were below the poverty line in 2003) get 40 % of their protein from tortillas. Recently the price of tortillas went out of control:

The typical Mexican family of four consumes about one kilo — 2.2 pounds — of tortillas each day. In some areas of Mexico, the price per kilo has risen from 63 cents a year ago to between $1.36 and $1.81 earlier this month.

With a minimum wage of $4.60 a day, Mexican families with one wage earner have been faced in recent months with the choice of having to spend as much as a third of their income on tortillas — or eating less or switching to cheaper alternatives.

So now they are switching to cheaper and far less nutritious alternatives, such as instant noodles.

The root cause of this situation is the bonanza American farmers are making from switching from growing subsidised corn for animal food to subsidised corn for ethanol production. The reasons why the peasant farmers of Mexico, who grow the higher quality white corn designed for human consumption, don’t benefit while the American farmers, who grow yellow corn for animal feed, do are complex and contradictory. Let’s say that in the vertical integration of oligopolistic transnational corporate industrial food production (a single company, Grupo Gruma, controls as much as 80 percent of the Mexican tortilla flour market) the peasants get squeezed out. In fact yellow corn seems to be mixed into the milled flour for tortillas, while, as far as I can make out, the white corn is ending up in Mexican cows and chooks, thus pushing up the price of eggs, dairy products and meat as well.

And Mexican peasants are increasingly heading north, running the gauntlet of the increasingly ferocious border security, some no doubt to end up as cheap farm labourers.

I’m not altogether sure whether ethanol from corn results in less CO2 emissions. I suspect it does not. But now another tale is unfolding which may implicate American corn.

It seems the bees of Germany are dying - a 25 percent drop in bee populations throughout Germany has been reported, up to 80% in isolated cases. In the US losses are even higher – 70% on the east coast and 60% on the west coast since November.

Walter Haefeker of the German Beekeepers Association says that there are probably a number of causes:

one being the varroa mite, introduced from Asia, and another is the widespread practice in agriculture of spraying wildflowers with herbicides and practicing monoculture. Another possible cause, according to Haefeker, is the controversial and growing use of genetic engineering in agriculture.

It seems that ‘Bt corn’ has been modified to produce its own insecticide. 40% of US corn has this charming feature which is now being introduced to Europe. Free trade rules and Monsanto will not be denied.

Whether or not a linkage can be established with GM corn, unanticipated effects of such genes released into the biosphere have always worried me. And as Albert Einstein said, we can’t do without bees:

“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”