Tommy Denton

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Fidel Castro, the aging, ailing communist dictator of Cuba, warned last week that U.S. plans to speed development of renewable fuels primarily from corn-based ethanol will threaten food stocks for millions of poor people worldwide. Castro is easily dismissed in this country because he is, well, the communist dictator of Cuba.

When Lester R. Brown issues the same alarm, people should start paying attention to the long-term implications of employing the biofuel option to sate the voracious demand for powering the internal combustion engine on American highways and byways.

Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, has spent a long and distinguished career as one of the world's pre-eminent experts on agricultural policy and advocate of careful stewardship of the planet that sustains the web of life.

As a respected author or coauthor of 50 books and numerous scientific articles and monographs, Brown became involved in global agricultural matters early in his career while working in the U.S. Agriculture Department Foreign Agricultural Service.

In 1969, Brown left government to help organize and administer the Overseas Development Council, a position followed since by dedication to the study and advocacy of sustainable systems to preserve and enhance the world's ecosystems and harmonize the long-term human effects on the world's soil and water resources.

When Lester Brown urges caution about the exploitation of the planet's resources, he speaks from decades of intense observation, study and experience.

For those Americans who are indifferent to the prospects for hunger in the remote Third World and believe that ethanol is a win-win solution to what President Bush acknowledged as the nation's addiction to oil, Brown has some words of warning:

"If you think you are spending more each week at the supermarket, you may be right," he wrote in a recent essay released by the Earth Policy Institute. "Corn prices have doubled over the last year, wheat futures are trading at their highest level in 10 years, and rice prices are rising, too. In addition, soybean futures have risen by half."

According to a Bloomberg analysis, Brown noted, soaring use of corn as the feedstock for fuel ethanol is "creating unintended consequences throughout the global food chain."

As a consequence, the first nations hit hardest in the diversion of corn from food to fuel purposes are those with corn-based diets. In Mexico, a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas has triggered street protests by angry crowds of tens of thousands of Mexicans, driving the government to institute price controls on tortillas.

According to Brown, rising grain and soybean prices are driving up meat and egg prices in China. Pork prices in January were up 20 percent over a year earlier, eggs increased 16 percent, and beef, less reliant on grain, was up 6 percent.

In the United States, the Agriculture Department is projecting that wholesale prices of chicken will be 10 percent higher on average than last year, a dozen eggs will soar by 21 percent, and milk will rise 14 percent. And such trends, Brown said, are only the beginning.

"In the past, food price rises have usually been weather-related and always temporary," he wrote. "This situation is different. As more and more fuel ethanol distilleries are built, world grain prices are starting to move up toward their oil-equivalent value in what appears to be the beginning of a long-term rise."

Food and energy economies, once separate, are now merging. As a result, Brown projected, "the stage is now set for the direct competition for grain between the 800 million people who own automobiles and the world's 2 billion poorest people. The risk is that millions of those on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder will start falling off as higher food prices drop their consumption below the survival level."

Skeptics inclined to pooh-pooh such warnings as needlessly alarmist should consider a February report from the World Food Programme Director James T. Morris. The report revealed that 18,000 children worldwide already are dying each day from hunger and malnutrition.

When even frail, old Fidel Castro can figure out where this trend is headed, more of the world's comfortably satisfied citizens would do well to begin pondering that troublesome law of unintended consequences.

Denton's column appears in the Sunday and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.