Biofuels - Killing Poor People Since 2005

In these pages and elsewhere, here, and here, the LibertyGuys have repeatedly exposed the government’s ethanol scam for what it is - naked fascism disguised as “aid to family farms” and “energy independence”. As early as 2005, we were not only warning about the non-viability of even heavily-subsidized ethanol as an economic, less-polluting gasoline alternative, (dimwitted green fantasies / wishful thinking to the contrary) but were also early exponents of the view that the diversion of food crops and resources to fuel production could lead to a calamitous food emergency across poor subsistence cultures.

Counterpunch’s Robert Bryce exhaustively catalogs the failures of the ADM-Grace-Cargill grifting scheme in a new article.

This is the best quote, which drives our point about the diversion of food crops home;

“An April 8 internal report by the World Bank found that grain prices increased by 140 percent between January 2002 and February 2008.
“This increase was caused by a confluence of factors but the most important was the large increase in biofuels production in the U.S. and E.U. Without the increase in biofuels, global wheat and maize [corn] stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate.” Robert Zoellick, president of the Bank, acknowledged those facts, saying that biofuels are “no doubt a significant contributor” to high food costs. And he said that “it is clearly the case that programs in Europe and the United States that have increased biofuel production have contributed to the added demand for food.”