Biofools?
Good day, Henry here. Out walking this morning I felt the first real sense that Summer had arrived. The air is warm. The grass is starting to grow. The trees are starting to bud out in leaf. It is good to be alive in the Summertime.
A small part of me that is still a farmer invariably has the fantasy of firing up the tractor and beginning to put in the crops. That was always a good time to be alive. It is really the beginning of the farming year. Farmers put in their crop, hoping this will be a bountiful and profitable year.
Then I came home and read the morning paper which had extensive coverage on the bursting cost of food stuffs. Wheat, corn and rice are exploding in price. A large part of the developing world is feeling the pain of serious increases in the cost of food. The Globe and Mail tells me that a large part of the world doesn’t live with my fantasy of either a bountiful or profitable year.
They report that 485 millions of people earn between 75 cents and 1 dollar US a day, 323 million people earn between 50 cents and 75 cents a day, and 162 million earn less than 50 cents a day. The article goes on to say that there are 11 different areas in the world where there is hunger unrest, where people are literally fighting for food.
One of the demands that is driving up the cost of food for these people on the edge is the cost of biofuels. It sounds to me like the developed world is keeping huge numbers of people on the edge and perhaps creating famine for many, so that westerners can fill up their SUV’S with fuel and continue to devour the largest part of the available fuel supply in the world. Isn’t it time we started to seriously do things better?
Update: {Steve} With the recent flooding in Iowa, a huge amount of corn has been lost and because so much corn is being converted into biofuels (using up much of the overflow supply), it’s going to drive up the price of many grocery items we all need. Well, I guess that’s o.k., as long as people can keep driving their SUVs, right?