Biofoolish

The EPA holds corn ethanol accountable ... sort of 18

In February 2008, a group of researchers led by Tim Searchinger of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School published a paper (PDF) in Science Express called, “Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change.”

Their conclusion was startling: the government policy of supporting biofuel production, which had begun in the 1970s and accelerated with the Energy Act of 2005, was increasing, not reducing, greenhouse gas emissions. Under President Bush, support for domestic biofuels—through tax credits, protective tariffs, and escalating consumption mandates, and more—was really the federal government’s only organized effort to combat climate change. And if Searchinger and his colleagues were correct, the biofuel was actively contributing to climate change.

The researchers’ argument went like this: If government incentives inspired biofuel makers to divert a billion bushels of corn away from food and feed uses to ethanol plants, that billion bushels of corn would have to be grown somewhere else to keep up with food/deed demand—say, in what had previously been grasslands in Argentina. And by turning perennial grassland into an annually planted, highly fertilized cornfield, you’re generating greenhouse gas emissions—that could turn out to overwhelm greenhouse gas reductions from replacing petroleum-based gasoline with ethanol.

Not even cellulosic ethanol survived the analysis intact. “Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%,” the authors concluded.

Understandably, the Searchinger analysis dropped like a bomb in biofuel circles. Critics seized on it as proof that the biofuel program was at best a feeble response to the looming threat of climate change; boosters thundered that the assumptions were all wrong. But indirect land-use changes inspired by the ethanol program could no longer be ignored. Another big boost to ethanol mandates came with the 2007 Energy Act, but the law also required the EPA to come up with a total lifecycle analysis of biofuels’ impact on greenhouse gas emissions.

Obama’s EPA on Tuesday delivered its much-awaited proposal for evaluating the greenhouse gas-reducing performance of biofuels—which, to the biofuel industry’s chagrin, includes indirect land use changes. Well, actually, the agency delivered two options for reckoning with land use and is seeking comment on which one will make it into the final rule, to be issued on November 30.

The first option would “assumes a 30 year time period for assessing future GHG emissions impacts and values equally all emission impacts, regardless of time of emission impact (i.e., 0% discount rate),” the EPA document states. “The second option assesses emissions impacts over a 100 year time period and discounts future emissions at 2% annually.”

In the document, the EPA includes a table showing how each kind of biofuel—from ones that exist in commercial form (corn-based ethanol, soy-based biodiesel) to ones that don’t (switchgrass and corn stover-based cellulosic ethanol)—fares in greenhouse gas terms under each scenario.

Under the 30-year scenario, corn-based ethanol looks like a truly horrible idea. Ethanol made in natural-gas-powered plants result in a 5 percent increase in GHG emission, compared to petroleum-based gasoline. For ethanol from coal-powered plants, the gain would be a jaw-dropping 34 percent.

Things look much rosier under the 100-year scenario, because over time replacing gasoline with ethanol “pays back” the one-time effect of land-use changes. Under this scenario, natural-gas-powered ethanol delivers a 16 percent cut in GHG emissions, while coal-powered ethanol productions results in a relatively modest 13 percent hike in emissions. Significantly, neither would pass the EPA’s test that biofuels deliver at least a 20 percent GHG cut to qualify under the Renewable Fuel Standard mandates.

Under both models, cellulosic forms look like big GHG winners—although they have yet to be made at commercial scale. Soy biodiesel, for its part, adds to GHG by 4 percent under the 30-year horizon, and subtracts 22 percent under the 100-year model.

The EPA will be seeking public comment on which scenario it should use for reckoning GHG performance. Biofuel producers would like to scuttle the land-use tests completely. During a press conference Tuesday (listen to it here), Renewable Fuels Association President Robert Dinneen called indirect land-use considerations far too complicated to get a handle on. He encouraged the EPA to focus on “apples to apples” comparisons between biofuels and gasoline.

I called Tim Searchinger, lead author of the land-use study, to get his perspective on the proposed rules with regard to life-cycle calculations. He made what I consider to be a devastating critique of the 100-year scenario as an analysis tool. He pointed out that scientists are calling for steep cuts in overall greenhouse gas emissions by 2050: anything less courts climate chaos.

He also criticized the 2 percent annual discount for emissions into the model. “Discounting is a concept from economics—it makes sense to discount, say, revenue streams. But it makes no sense to discount emissions. It’s just wrong.” He added: “The long horizon and discount rate ignore the true cost of emissions. We’re talking about ice caps melting and the methane being released from tundra. Do we really have a hundred years” to wait for GHG cuts?

The 30-year horizon is, at least theoretically, much more reasonable, Searchinger told me. But even here, he adds, the EPA is using “wildly optimistic” assumptions to come up with its GHG projections. For example, he said, the agency neglects to account for the potential conversion of peat land in Southeast Asia—a tremendous carbon sink—into palm plantations to offset soy diverted to biodiesel in the U.S. If even 2 percent of peatland gets flattened for that purpose, soy biodiesel’s GHG footprint will have expanded dramatically.

Of course, in the case of corn-based ethanol, all of this is academic. The proposed EPA rule would grandfather in as much as 15 billion gallons of “first-generation” biofuels, regardless of GHG performance. Last year, the industry produced 9 billion gallons. Few observers believe that the U.S. corn ethanol industry is capable of churning out more than 15 billion gallons under any circumstances.

“Corn ethanol is a done deal,” Searchinger told me. “There’s no stopping it.” The question going forward, he said, will be the land-use changes caused by other forms of ethanol, ones that do well under the EPA scenarios, like cellulosic and sugarcane.

In related news, the Obama administration rolled out a host of new supports for the ailing ethanol industry, in addition to the $5 billion-$7 billion it already gets in tax breaks and other goodies. From The New York Times:

The White House made its first major statement on ethanol on Tuesday, mustering three Cabinet members to outline a plan to shield corn ethanol producers from the credit crisis, work with them to cut their use of natural gas and coal in ethanol production, and nudge the auto industry toward production of vehicles that can use ethanol at concentrations of up to 85 percent.


In pursuing these goals, the Secretaries of Agriculture and Energy, Tom Vilsack and Steven Chu, along with the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, announced during a press conference the formation of a “Biofuels Interagency Working Group,” comprised of the three agencies.

In the above-linked press conference, the Renewable Fuels Association’s Dinneen praised those moves. “The president has sent an incredibly important signal that biofuels are going to be a key component in his strategy to address energy, economic, and environmental challenges,” he said.

Grist food editor Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Follow my Twitter feed; contact me at tphilpott[at]grist[dot]org.

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  1. Tyler Durden Posted 10:42 pm
    05 May 2009

    I don't get the implied basic assumption, that burning biofuel causes any less GHG emissions than burning petroleum.  Don't get me wrong, I hate petroleum and think it should be left in the ground like coal and uranium.  But anything burned produces at least carbon dioxide if you're lucky.  In other words, CO2 is the best result you can get from burning fuel.  Everything else is more toxic.  So please explain: forgetting about the indirect effects, how does burning biofuel reduce GHG emissions?

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  2. Tom Philpott's avatar

    Tom Philpott Posted 6:37 am
    06 May 2009

    Tyler,The idea is that carbon released from petroleum has been tied up a long time, while carbon released from, say, corn, was only recently sequestered, and can be sequestered again the next season. That's the "miracle" of biofuels -- they only recycle carbon already out there, adding no "new" carbon to the cycle. Of course, we also know that there are all manner of emissions associated with planting and harvesting corn, then you've got nitrous oxide from fertilizer -- way underestimated in these reckonings, probably -- in addition to the indirect emissions pointed to by Searchinger, et al.

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  3. enviroperk Posted 6:42 am
    06 May 2009

     The elephant-in-the-room is the discovery that  new technologies simple move the impact of personal transportation from one area to the other.  Ethanol being the greatest example: we are now burning food for the pleasure of propelling ourselves around the countryside.  We are increasing the cost of basic foodstuffs world wide because we do not want to give up our automobiles.  Arguably, there is no clean technology that justifies a use of propelling ourselves around in private cars. The energy has to come from somewhere.Perhaps we should turn this problem over and identify why we have to drive? A zero-based budget problem. Our environmental conscience has not resulted in enough change to make a real difference.Dare we re-structure our lives and industry around the concept that there are no cars?  Certainly life would go on.  What if motor fuel, of any composition, costs $20 per gallon today? How would we change? Would we telecommute? Would the public school down the street, rather than the private school 40 miles away suddenly be perfectly adaquate for our children. Would we plan and route every shopping trip or excursion for maximum effective use of the vehicle? Would we only go shopping once or twice per month.? Would we telecommute? Take a closer but lower paying job? Would we be making that trip with neighbors instead of making it alone? Would small, walkable, self contained towns be more desirable?There are so many changes we can make that are much more rational than multi- billion dollar technologies that still pollute, or ones that swap food producing for fuel production. We are just too married to the concept of "car"  to make them without a push. Like $20 gas.   

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  4. Biodiversivist's avatar

    Biodiversivist Posted 9:38 am
    06 May 2009

    This reminds me of the time our government insisted on fighting the Vietnam war against the wishes of its citizenry. Huge, sometimes violent protests were held but the war continued, with millions maimed and killed and hundreds of billions of dollars wasted, all to stop the Chinese communists (now our major trading partner) from overrunning the world. A complete and total waste. Started and perpetuated by Democrats, ended by a corrupt Republican who was eventually impeached. A recent prime example of just how destructive and stupid even a democracy can be.Look at the comments on this Green Inc blurb:http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/white-house-steps-up-support-for-biofuels/Reality is sinking in for those of us who support Obama. Because he is by far the least of two evils, we can't vote against him. He can do anything he wants. Soon, car makers will be forced to make cars flex fuel. You will be forced to pay for that extra complexity, and you will be forced to burn ever higher blends of corn in your car. Short of civil disobedience, as called for by Gore and Hansen, there isn't a  thing we can do about it.I hope Chu sleeps well at night having exchanged his scientist PJs for his politician ones. Nothing would garner more respect from me than to see him resign in protest of the administration's abandonment of science for political gain. I'm not holding my breath.The RFA is a paid propaganda machine. Nothing they say is true:http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2007/08/ethanolalternative-fuel-faq.html#q2  

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  5. Biodiversivist's avatar

    Biodiversivist Posted 10:13 am
    06 May 2009

    One more thing while I'm ranting here. Gristmill refugees out there may remember back in 2006 when we were all waiting for a much anticipated study in Science that was going to settle the issue of energy return on corn ethanol. The study by Farrell et al looked at six energy balance studies and concluded that 5 to 26% of corn ethanol was indeed renewable if you give energy credit to distillers grains:

    http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/311/5760/506 (sub required)

    Oddly enough, the RFA is perfectly happy with new science as long as it supports their paychecks. Go figure. The environmental community was disappointed but accepted the new science, as the RFA should with the latest. Although a negative return on energy would have been yet another straw on corn ethanol's back, it was not enough to stop government support in the past and it would not have been enough today either.

    To put the results of that study in laymen's terms, a corn ethanol refinery essentially converts fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, petroleum, and diesel) into ethanol adding a small amount of solar energy captured by the plants into the final product. For every gallon plus one quart of ethanol produced, the gallon is made from fossil fuels (mostly natural gas) and the quart came from plants. Essentially, this is a process that uses corn to turn natural gas and other assorted fossil fuels into alcohol while funneling tax dollars from blue states to red to capture that voting block.

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  6. Stephen Leahy Posted 10:45 am
    06 May 2009

    Great piece Tom. Number of other international studies also show biofuels mostly bad idea pushing up food prices and carbon emissions as well as a huge distraction from the real issue of big GHG reductions.Incredibly (but not surprising giving big ag's clout in DC) US taxpayers are subsidizing ethanol to the tune of $1.40 to $1.70 a gallon according an international research institute. My piece for IPS looks at that and the impact on global food prices -- Yet another reason why other countries hate US policy  http://bit.ly/bQ3tX

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  7. turanga leela's avatar

    turanga leela Posted 12:07 pm
    06 May 2009

    "A scientific account of the world is no more and no less than an explanation proffered at a particular place and time that is judged by a particular community of researchers to be true. Nonetheless, at some future time almost any scientific belief may find itself to be perfectly apropos of nothing. This does not mean, of course, that scientific truth does not exist, or that we are caught up in a world of vicious relativism, where whatever anyone says is true just because it has been said. Rather it means that scientific truth exists relative to a community of practitioners who have created a variety of procedures that guide research and criteria by which truth claims are evaluated." --Max Oelschlager, Postmodern Environmental EthicsNo one can lay claim to an absolute scientific truth, especially when one's own ends are intimately tied to it. Scientific research, even models that incorporate the data of a multitude of studies, is never exhaustive enough to make a comprehensive, far-reaching claim about the whole of an industry, or a community, or a culture. There are always bits that escape its reach, for one reason or another, and that is why consensus is so important, because it allows us to be sure enough to make decisions with far-reaching consequences. There are scientists who understand this and scientists who don't, and most scientists will jockey to be seen as "right," even (perhaps especially) when their conclusions fall far afield from where the rest of the scientific community is. And the public especially loves scientists who are seen as contrarians because it's a great story. Be wary of succumbing to that narrative. Searchinger is seen as an outlier by most life cycle modelers, particularly because he is so "sure" in his claims. People from institutions as diverse as the U of MN, Stanford, Argonne National Laboratory, NREL, and MIT have said this. Alex Farrell was a good scientist because he understood this as well--that consensus is building around the need to consider indirect land use change for all manner of things, not just corn ethanol, and it's an idea that will transform all of life cycle analysis forever, but it is not a subset of life cycle analysis that has reached maturity yet. Not even life cycle analysis itself has reached maturity yet. No one can be "sure" about something until it has been studied and demonstrated hundreds of times. That's how the scientific method works. So you can't draw a clear, bright line that says "anyone who is 'for'
    Searchinger's analysis is a 'true' environmentalist and anyone who
    isn't is a toady for the corn people," because it just isn't that
    simple.One more thing to keep in mind: that "voice in the wilderness" quality Searchinger has may be sexy, especially for environmental journalists, but that same quality makes Freeman Dyson sexy for the climate change deniers. So be careful when you use it for your cause, because it can easily be used against your cause. It's what eggheads like me call a slippery slope. Even I can see that, and I have only one eye.  0-)

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  8. Biodiversivist's avatar

    Biodiversivist Posted 1:38 pm
    06 May 2009

    You have a point Turanga in that scientists can get pretty obnoxious particularly when another researcher gets credit for something that was sitting right under their noses. In this case the common sense observation that sticking 35,000 square miles of the most efficiently produced food on the planet into our gas tanks would have a ripple effect on the global food chain. History is filled with hilarious accounts of scientists going after one another with much gusto.

    The question isn't whether or not land is being displaced. The question is how to best measure or model it. I would put stock in the Purdue model, (not because it is my alma mater but) because Purdue not only has one of the largest and oldest agricultural departments in the country, it is also a conservative school, sitting in the middle of corn fields in a very conservative state. If it finds corn ethanol worse than gas, it must be hard to show it otherwise!

    Sexy voice in the wilderness?

    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/newsblog/2009/02/fill-er-up-with-rainforest.html

    "..It's not known how much of new farmland is being used for biofuels, but Gibbs estimates it could be anywhere from a third to two-thirds. Unless biofuels are planted in pastures or degraded lands, she said, "we're going to be burning rainforest in our gas tanks..."

    http://www.esajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1890/08-0645.1

    "...A study published in ESA (Ecological Society of America) shows that land set aside to grow fallow would have…"..a greater net GHG savings than having the same plots under corn ethanol production for at least four decades..."

    http://news.mongabay.com/2007/1004-biodiesel.html

    "...Future intensification of biodiesel feedstock production in [the tropics], without proper mitigation guidelines, will likely further threaten the high concentrations of globally endemic species in these biodiversity hotspots.."

    and I could go on and on.

    I also spotted what appear to be several strawman arguments in your comment ; )  

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  9. Serge S. Gilbert Posted 2:15 pm
    06 May 2009

    Whether or not the conversion of corn and soy into ethanol is encouraged and/or mandated by the present administration, will it not be the case that increasing demand for agricultural products stemming from rising populations and increasing affluence of those populations will speed and force the conversion of the precious carbon sinks into agriculturally productive lands, at the cost of a tremendous release of unrecapturable C02?   I am wondering whether any regime designed to protect the sinks, undoubtedly consisting of environmental regulation animated by well-intended subsidies, can withstand what may ultimately be an unsurfeitable appetite (and market) for agriculture products.  The only thing that may be able to stop this appetite (and market), it seems to me, may be the consecration of all possible agricultural lands to agricultural purposes (carbon considerations be damned).  At any rate, one should not all that blithely assume that the sinks would remain intact but for the ethanol promotions of the present administration (which I deplore), which promised better.                                                                                                                                                                                      

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  10. racje Posted 3:38 pm
    06 May 2009

    If we all eat a lot less meat, eggs and dairy, the demand for corn, soy, and other grains in the food chain will go way down. Then, perhaps, the land the corn was grown on will be available to grow biofuels, with no demand to raze forests in the tropics.I don't know that meat consumption necessarily rises with affluence. It's a taste, a fashion, a class marker. It used to be desirable for rich folks to be soft, pale, and plump, to show they did not do physical labor, stayed indoors, and had enough to eat. Now the rich have time to tone themselves in the gym, tan in the tropics, and diet with personal coaches at elite spas, while the poor are pasty, corn-fed couch potatoes.Similarly, the idea that a slab of red meat shows wealth and status may soon wane, to be replaced with artisanal bread, hand-weeded arugula, dry-farmed tomatoes, and twelve-dollar-a-basket berries, while the animal-eating lower classes suffer from clogged arteries, hormonal derangement, and excess protein disorders. Farmers will continue to work hard and earn little. 

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  11. Tyler Durden Posted 8:29 pm
    06 May 2009

    Enviroperk's got it right; the rest of this is meaningless mumbo jumbo.  Did you know that only 8% of the people in the world drive cars?  Or that they were virtually non-existent just a little over 100 years ago?  How many of you stop to consider all of the severe harms caused by driving motor vehicles, including seldom-mentioned ones like all the noise, including noise in the oceans?Serge, the problem you're dancing around is overpopulation.  The only way to fix the resulting problems it causes is to reduce human population, and the only humane way to do that is through birth control (the only other way is death control).  But in answer to your query and its implications, I agree that I don't see laws or anything else stopping the starving masses from destroying everything in order to eat.  Humans have gotten themselves and the rest of the planet into a real pickle, and there may be no way out.

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  12. turanga leela's avatar

    turanga leela Posted 12:29 pm
    07 May 2009

    Racje- Don't forget there are radically different economic and social realities between the US and the developing world--a night and day difference. In the US it's true that the rich are more likely to go to health food stores and the poor to McDonald's, but the poor in this country are like the rich in other countries. The poor in developing nations are starving less now than they were a few years ago, but according to the big development programmes the #1 problem for them now is malnutrition. And don't forget about economies of scale--when you have 4 billion people, eating just one additional meal with meat and dairy per week is going to have a huge impact. But unfortunately it's not enough to just say "reduce the surplus population" because population growth is exponential, and humans (ideally) live past their teenage years, so something has to be done to feed the population we have until the birth rates have been lower than the death rates for long enough to have made a difference in the overall population. This is part of why people are so incensed about using food for fuel, because the population is growing so much. However, it is also true that the GMO foodstuffs we have become experts at making in this country are woefully inadequate in terms of total nutrition. Nutritious food--that is, organic food enriched with natural fertilizer--requires a much larger land area to grow than do agribusiness food crops, which have been bred for maximum yield, but not for maximum nutrition. So it seemed like a good idea to use up that GMO stuff for cars. But tying the food commodities market to the fuel market made foodstuffs more valuable for investors, which radically raised the price of food faster than real wages were going up. Of course there were other things going on in the marketplace, like commodities being a safe bet for investors when other markets like housing were more volatile, and in the end it may take a while to understand and separate how much of an effect each factor had. What we do know is that the biofuels boom played its part in the food price explosion, and that combination is too dangerous for anyone to any longer consider biofuels made from food as a long term solution for reducing fossil fuel use. This is why government incentives for corn ethanol and whatnot are being frozen where they are right now--not as much because of GHGs. And the risk of volatile market response is enough of a reason why we can't grow our way out of society's needs for, as the industry says, "food, feed, and fuel"--because it isn't a volume issue, it's a market issue.You say, "Farmers will continue to work hard and earn little." That is true for most farmers. And that is why farmers have to be incorporated in some way that is beneficial to them in our society's plans to reduce society's GHGs. The trouble is, how to include them. My understanding of farmers is that whatever can increase their earning power will be seen by them as a good thing, so it shouldn't matter whether they're selling corn for ethanol or carbon offsets or biogas or cellulosic biomass or whatever, so long as they get some kind of economic boost for doing the right thing. But it's imperative now that we are setting a 50+ year plan in motion for those of us who are writing policy to think about how to make sure farmers who are struggling get an income boost from a low carbon economy instead of additional financial woes, but do so in a way that actually solves the problem of global warming rather than a way that does nothing to reduce GHGs, or worse, exacerbates the problem, because it's not their job to be experts about what are truly effective GHG-reducing policies--it's ours.

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  13. turanga leela's avatar

    turanga leela Posted 12:46 pm
    07 May 2009

    BioD-
    I tried to reply yesterday but I had technical difficulties with my browser.You are right. There are no LCA models that have "zero" as a number for indirect land use change, and the biofuels industry is going to pay some kind of GHG penalty for it, as other industries already do (such as the carbon offsetting/afforestation/reforestation industry, which pays for ILUC, or as they call it, "leakage"). You are also right that I was perhaps overly snarky with my "corn toadies" comment. I have been called that, but not here on Grist, simply because I don't see the value in environmentalists going out of their way to be verbally insulting and frightening to farmers, as though farmers were their enemies. It's important to speak politely to the people who grow your food, and if you want to suggest that they grow it differently, then make those suggestions as gentle and pleasant-sounding as possible. ;)I know lots of life cycle modelers, and they all say that Searchinger's conclusions were a bit "out there," simply because they placed too much language of certainty on what is still uncertain. He worked with a team of researchers at the Center for Agriculture and Rural Development (CARD) at the University of Iowa for the commodity-value portion of the model, and there was a lot of internal strife there about whether or not the report was ready for prime time. They don't think he's too far off the mark, but generally it's considered bad form to present inconclusive findings as conclusive--precisely because people can come back and challenge you on them later on, which is exactly what happened. Just know that you don't endear yourself to life cycle modelers, or to the biofuel industry, when you cite Searchinger. If you want to build bridges and get a good national climate policy package passed sometime this century, cite CARD or FAPRI. The ag industry getting behind a climate policy in general is going to be the tipping point--and they've got lots of incentive to do something about climate change, being that their industry is the one that is the most dependent on the availability of rainfall, and the latest climate projections for 2100 out of NOAA are enough to give the director of the National Farm Bureau nightmares.

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  14. Serge S. Gilbert Posted 1:11 pm
    07 May 2009

    Well, as I understand it, the farm subsidy policies in the U.S. are a debacle and a shame.  Too many big farmers have been profiteering at the expense of small farmers, both home and abroad.  It is almost impossible to contrive a regime of farm subsidy policies which do not quickly become co opted by the monster farmers who have no need of them.  And in fact, this latest set of regulations favoring first generation bio-fuels acts as essentially yet another sop thrown to a key Democratic constituency and swing vote.   So it doesn't seem to me that farmers, big or small, need subsidies, for bio-fuel or anything else.  To essentialize the farmer as "small and struggling" or whatever ignores the realities of agribusiness and the strength of its political arm in D.C.  Paying farmers to make higher cost essential goods, the purchase of which we then subsidize for people who can't afford them at those higher costs, seems, frankly, absurd.  Paying people for use of their land as carbon sinks, essentially landfills or dump yards for carbon, seems far more defensible.  That's where the energy and debate should be focused, it seems to me, while the complex regulatory and subsidies regime for the farm lobby should be eschewed.   

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  15. turanga leela's avatar

    turanga leela Posted 2:33 pm
    07 May 2009

    The farming industry is like a lot of other industries--there are a small number of huge and highly profitable operations that still manage to get fat government paychecks in addition to the paychecks they're already getting. But it's unfair to assume that all farmers are getting money they don't need just because there's a few who are. That said, the subsidy system is horribly inefficient and horribly structured. What sense does it make to pay farmers to grow crops that nobody really wants, like GMO corn? A lot of smaller scale farmers do need help--or they go bankrupt. But what they should be getting is income support, not price support. Income support would free them up to grow whatever they want, and I know a lot of people who grew up in farming towns who are friends with people who are still farming who would like to grow organic vegetables and whatnot but feel that making the switch is too risky. The conservative, ideological ones prefer price support because income support feels too much like welfare to them. But the pragmatists realize that income support would be far more efficient and would not allow debacles like highly profitable and huge operations getting government checks on top of their earnings to happen. But those highly profitable operations are also well connected in the Farm Bureau, which is well connected in DC, and is going to lobby like hell to make sure a switch from price support to income support never happens. The thing to do, as I see it, would be to organize all the Farmers Unions, which are usually made up of the smaller and more progressive operations, to lobby for income support. That might have some effect on the next Farm Bill.As a side note, it is just as unfair to characterize Midwestern agriculture as run by greedy agribusiness profiteers as it is to portay a romanticized, 19th century pastoralist enterprise. Neither is true. There are lots and lots of farmers who produce commodities that are then purchased by ADM. ADM is not a farmer. They purchase commodities that are grown by farmers. That's why every small Midwestern farming town has a grain elevator and silos in the middle, so that the farmers can bring their corn in at the end of the season and sell it to ADM. But these small farming operations use big diesel tractors, ammonia fertilizer, and all the other stuff that is harmful to the rural landscape as a whole. So it's not a monolithic, evil agribusiness system versus the noble small scale organic farmer. It's one mindset versus another, perpetuated by a broken government funding system. Farmers both organic and non will tell you this themselves.

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  16. Serge S. Gilbert Posted 3:28 pm
    07 May 2009

    Turanga:You seem extremely well informed, and I find much to agree with in your analysis.  I too would prefer income support over price supports, ceteris paribus. But other things are not equal.  There is much that is unsettling and indeed untenable about income support, the theory and the practice both, is there not?  Why should a struggling farmer be income-supported more than a struggling aluminum siding salesman, would be the first question, I think.  It is and should be impossible to distinguish normatively between the two occupations.  What the state does for one equally placed citizen, it must do for all, on grounds of equal protection of the laws.
    Secondly, income supports for farmers would, ultimately, amount to a tariff on foods from other places and ensure that U.S. foods are more expensive for those who can least afford the price hikes.If the dichotomy between greedy agribusiness and 19th century pastoralist is indeed the fiction which you suggest, it is hard for me to see how farm subsidies of any kind can be justified, much less those which tend to result in depredations on carbon sinks. 

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  17. turanga leela's avatar

    turanga leela Posted 9:27 am
    08 May 2009

    Aha--you've called me out of the socialist closet. ;)According to the conservative view of economics, the government acts in the best interest of its people by ensuring the health of industry--making jobs available for all, so that everyone who wants to work has the opportunity to do so. But according to this view, government should not intrude unduly on competition, because the marketplace is the best decider of what industries and individual economic entities succeed or fail. It's kind of like social Darwinism, actually. But from a humanist perspective, the result of classical conservatism has been that the laissez-faire approach has allowed industry to game the system, tilting everything in their favor at the expense of workers. The result? Longer working hours, fewer jobs, a high unemployment rate, captains of industry making huge profits while the masses struggle to get by. This is not merely rhetoric, especially when magazines like The Economist have been following these social trends for some time. And the other result is the tragedy of the commons--nobody is responsible for what happens to externalities--soil, air, water quality, resource depletion.Enter the Farm Bill. From a basic Enlightenment era view of human existence, on which this country was founded, there are such things as basic human rights. And food is a basic human right. To a certain extent the US government has modernised and agrees with this statement. The Farm Bill is actually a holdover to the era when our country courted socialism--the 30s and 40s. This thinking is therefore a strange fit for our government's generally conservative approach to economics (which holds that we should ensure jobs so that people can buy food). But food is an area where we run up against our favorite national myth--American exceptionalism. Not everyone can work, after all, because not everyone in a family is a wage-earner (children, for example, and the disabled and the elderly). And there are even a lot of people who do work but can still barely afford to feed themselves because they earn so little. And if we allowed some of our own people to starve, meaning the ones who can't work or whose wages are too low for them to adequately feed themselves, we would not be exceptional. Thus we subsidize the production of food.Imagine what would happen now if we dismantled the Farm Bill entirely. It would still be built on a commodity system, because the commodity system pre-dates the Farm Bill. It's more similar, in fact, to the cash-cropping system we started with as slave-owning colonists. But now we have the ability through technology to treat farming like any other business--that is, maximize profits in the short term while minimizing concern for externalities like soil and water in the long term--to strip the soil dry of nutrients and pollute our own waterways, with no oversight at all. People would continue to grow commodity crops--getting the biggest return for the smallest amount of input--only now there would be no incentive to place any limits on what they grow or how it's grown. You could say goodbye to all conservation lands in the Midwestern agricultural landscape. There would be no incentives to consider nutritional needs whatsoever, or any ecological considerations, which are also now mandated by the Farm Bill. It is for all of these social and ecological reasons that food production cannot be dealt with in the same way as aluminum siding production, if we want to do right by society and the rural landscape.As to your final point, as I understand it, the critique coming from developing nations who are members of the WTO is that the US and Europe produce food too cheaply because we subsidize our farmers, so that there is no market for food commodities coming from those developing nations, which lack both economies of scale and the ability to subsidize their farmers, because their GDPs are too low. (Of course, some of these nations are also corrupt and allow the upper classes to embezzle their tax revenues, but that's another matter...)

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  18. Tyler Durden Posted 1:09 am
    15 May 2009

    That would only be true if all of the corn used for biofuel were planted on land where the concrete was dug up in order to plant.  (In that case, considering that we'd have to continually dig up more and more concrete, including roads, this could be a very positive development!)

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