- Engdahl: Über subventionierte Biotreibstoffe und Nahrungsmittelpreisteigerungen - André, 26.07.2007, 20:50
Engdahl: Über subventionierte Biotreibstoffe und Nahrungsmittelpreisteigerungen
-->Going global with bio-fuels
The Bush-Lula pact is just the start of a growing global rush to plant crops for bio-fuel. Huge sugarcane, palm oil and soy plantations for bio-fuel refining are taking over forests and grasslands in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Soy cultivation has already caused the deforestation of 21 million hectares in Brazil and 14 million ha in Argentina, with no end in sight, as world grain prices continue to rise. Soya is used for bio-diesel fuel.
China, desperate for energy sources, is a major player in bio-fuel cultivation, reducing food crop acreage there as well. In the EU most bio-diesel fuel is produced using rapeseed plants, a popular animal feed. The result? Meat prices around the globe are rising and set to continue rising as far ahead as the eye can see. The EU has a target requiring minimum bio-fuel content of 10%, a foolish demand that will set aside 18% of EU farmland to cultivate crops to be burned as bio-fuel.
Big oil is also driving the bio-fuels bandwagon. Prof. David Pimentel of Cornell University and other scientists claim that net energy output from bio-ethanol fuel is less than the fossil fuel energy used to produce the ethanol. Measuring all energy inputs to produce ethanol from production of nitrogen fertilizer to energy needed to clean the considerable waste from bio-fuel refineries, Pimintel’s research showed a net energy loss of 22% for bio-fuel—they use more energy than they produce. That translates into little threat to oil demand and huge profit for clever oil giants that re-profile themselves as “green energy” producers.
So it’s little wonder that ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP are all into bio-fuels. This past May, BP announced the largest ever R&D grant to a university, $500 million to the University of California-Berkeley to fund BP-dictated R&D into alternative energy including bio-fuels. Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Program got $100 million from ExxonMobil; University of California-Davis got $25 million from Chevron for its Bio-energy Research Group. Princeton University’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative takes $15 million from BP.
Lord Browne, the disgraced former CEO of BP declared in 2006, “The world needs new technologies to maintain adequate supplies of energy for the future. We believe bioscience can bring immense benefits to the energy sector.” The bio-fuel market is booming like few others today. This all is a paradise for global agribusiness industrial companies like Cargill, ADM and Monsanto, Syngenta.
All this, combined with severe weather problems in China, Australia, Ukraine and large parts of the EU growing areas this harvest season, guarantee that grain prices are set to explode further in coming months and years. Some are gleefully reporting the end of the era of “cheap food.” With disappearing food security reserves and disappearing acreage going to plant corn and grains for food, the bio-fuel transformation will impact global food prices massively in coming years.
Another agenda behind Ethanol?
Uh Huh. The dramatic embrace of bio-fuels by the Bush Administration since 2005 has clearly been the global driver for soaring grain and food prices in the past 18 months. The evidence suggests this is no accident of sloppy legislative preparation. The US Government has been researching and developing bio-fuels since the 1970’s. The bio-ethanol architects did their homework we can be assured. It’s increasingly clear that the same people who brought us oil price inflation are now deliberately creating parallel food price inflation. We have had a rise in average oil prices of some 300% since the end of 2000 when George W. Bush and Dick Halliburton Cheney made oil the central preoccupation of US foreign policy.
Last year, as bio-ethanol production first became a major market factor, corn prices rose by some 130% on the Chicago in 14 months. It was more than known when Congress and the Bush Administration made their heavy push for bio-ethanol in 2005 that world grain reserves had been declining at alarming levels for several years at a time when global demand, driven especially by growing wealth And increasing meat consumption in China, was rising.
As a result of the diversion of record acreages of US and Brazilian corn and soybeans to bio-fuel production, food reserves are literally disappearing. Global food security, according to FAO data, is at its lowest since 1972. Curiously that was just the time that Henry Kissinger and the Nixon Administration engineered, in cahoots with Cargill and ADM—the major backers of the ethanol scam today—what was called The Great Grain Robbery, sale of huge volumes of US grain to the Soviet Union in exchange for sales of record volumes of Russian oil to the West. Both oil and corn prices rose by 1975 some 300-400% as a result.
Today a new element has replaced USSR grain demand and harvest shortfalls. Bio-fuel demand, fed by US government subsidies is literally linking food prices to oil prices. The scale of the subsidized bio-fuel consumption has exploded so dramatically since the beginning of 2006 when the US Energy Policy Act of 2005 first began to impact crop planting decisions, not only in the USA, that there is emerging a de facto competition between people and cars for the same grains. Lester Brown recently noted, “We’re looking at competition in the global market between 800 million automobiles and the world’s two billion poorest people for the same commodity, the same grains. We are now in a new economic era where oil and food are interchangeable commodities because we can convert grain, sugar cane, soybeans—anything—into fuel for cars. In effect the price of oil is beginning to set the price of food.”
In the mid-1970’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a protégé of the Rockefeller family and of its institutions stated, “Control the oil and you control entire nations; control the food and you control the people.” The same cast of characters who brought the world the Iraq war, the global scramble to control oil, who brought us patented genetically manipulated seeds and now Terminator suicide seeds, and who cry about the “problem of world over-population,” are now backing conversion of global grain production to burn as fuel at a time of declining global grain reserves. That alone should give pause for thought. As the popular saying goes, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.”
http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/engdahl/2007/0725.html
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