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RAIDING THE PANTRY
Now I don’t ever remember while growing up sticking a cob of corn into my car’s gas tank, but people do crazy things when oil goes above $100 per barrel. Sky-high fossil fuel prices have sent car owners in developed countries searching for cheaper oil alternatives. And that’s just making things worse for all of us.
Egypt, which has already been struggling with rising oil prices, is now feeling the sting of skyrocketing food prices brought on, to a large extent, by the switch to biofuels. Vast swathes of land around the world are being converted from growing food for people to growing food for cars. The competition for agricultural land is driving up international cereal crop prices, and local markets with them.
Here in Egypt, soaring food prices are fueling discontent. Soldiers armed with rolling pins have been called in to battle bread shortages. Koshary – with its rice, lentils and wheat pasta – is fast becoming status food. And the roasted corn vendor on my street is demanding an extra 50 piastres per cob, claiming the animal feed he passes off as corn costs more to import because people halfway around the world are using it to fuel their SUVs.
There are a lot of external reasons for food inflation, not all of them realized by my corn vendor. For one, unusually bad weather has caused crop failures around the world. Then there’s those upwardly mobile Chinese, who are absolutely batty about KFC, chowing down on 2 million corn-fed chicken meals a day.
But I can’t blame the Chinese for craving a Snack Box any more than I blame Egyptians for protesting their right to have fuul. The problem, as I see it, is this mad obsession with using perfectly good agricultural land to produce ethanol. Last year, 100 million tons of grain – enough to put a big dent in world hunger – was diverted into bio-fuels.
The truth is, just about anything that can be eaten can be made into some form of bio-fuel. Vegetable oil, sugar cane, rice and even chicken grease have all been tried. Some are obviously more efficient than others, but now that cars and people have the same diet, it’s time to think hard about where our priorities are.
Replacing a fossil fuel, which can’t be used as sandwich spread, with a cereal that could feed a hungry mouth, just so someone can save a bit of money while cruising around in their car is, well, inhumane. The grain it takes to fill a typical car’s gas tank with ethanol could feed one person for six months.
Egypt is caught up in a global wave of food inflation. Export taxes, price controls and subsidies are only band-aid solutions. Like it or not, the best we can hope for is that the nations promoting cereal-based bio-fuels come to their senses. Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif may have appeared naïve when he recently appealed to the public for a solution to rising food prices, but he would only look more foolish if he claimed he had one.
CAM MCGRATH
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