As predicted, grain costs are skyrocketing around the world causing so much political and social unrest that the British Telegraph published a headline Tuesday declaring "Global Warming Rage Lets Global Hunger Grow" (picture courtesy AP).
Contrary to Nobel Laureate Al Gore's depiction of this energy panacea in his film "An Inconvenient Truth," as well as his investments in companies responsible for such processes, the Telegraph viewed biofuel as a growing international calamity (emphasis added throughout):
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.
Nice. Think this will be headline/lead story news in the States?
The world food situation is very serious: we have seen riots in Egypt, Cameroon, Haiti and Burkina Faso," said Mr Diouf. "There is a risk that this unrest will spread in countries where 50pc to 60pc of income goes to food," he said.
Haiti's government fell over the weekend following rice and bean riots. Five died.
The global food bill has risen 57pc in the last year. Soaring freight rates make it worse. The cost of food "on the table" has jumped by 74pc in poor countries that rely on imports, according to the FAO.
Roughly 100m people are tipping over the survival line. The import ratio for grains is: Eritrea (88pc), Sierra Leone (85pc), Niger (81pc), Liberia (75pc), Botswana (72pc), Haiti (67pc), and Bangladesh (65pc).
And here was the fabulous conclusion:
The world intelligentsia has been asleep at the wheel. While we rage over global warming, global hunger has swept in under the radar screen.
Darned right.
In the end, biofuel policy around the world is an absolute disaster stoked in the past several years by climate alarmists. Sadly, this appears to have become a new third rail in American politics, for few politicians dare point fingers at this problem.
After all, this has been sold for years by politicians on both sides of the aisle as the solution to oil dependence. And, recently, this has been strongly advocated by virtually every Democrat as a key to solving global warming.
As political leaders will likely continue to punt this issue down the field, the fate of the nation might rest on media representatives depicting a more accurate picture of this crisis raising a pivotal question: can press outlets drop their green fascination in time to stop the world from burning all its food?
