grow food for people, not for cars and animals

[Guest guest]

Michael Pollan on alleviating food crisis

By Kate Cheney Davidson, Yale Environment 360

Posted on July 8, 2008

http://www.alternet.org/story/90785/

What do you think can be done on a global scale to alleviate what

may be the beginning of a food crisis on a level we've never seen

before?

MP: From one level, it's very simple. Grain is the basis of the

diet

for most of the people in the world, and grain prices have

suffered

this surge in prices over the last year that's unprecedented.

That's

because we began making this huge investment in ethanol and

subsidizing ethanol production. That led to a spike in corn prices

because we were making corn-based ethanol. But when you have a

spike

in one grain's prices, all the farmers rush to produce more of

that

grain. So you had wheat and soybean farmers getting into corn and

out of soy and wheat, so that reduced the supply of wheat and

soy

and the prices there went crazy too. So that's the big cause.

What do we do? Well, it's pretty simple. There are three things we

need to do. One is fairly easy and the other two get harder. One

is

back off on this commitment to ethanol, reduce the subsidies we're

giving-- it's about 51 cents a gallon now-- and cut out the

tariffs

on importing ethanol from Brazil. They can produce it more

efficiently, and basically we're protecting our market by keeping

that ethanol out.

The next thing we have to do is a little more complicated. The

other

reason for this increase in food prices, and it's related, is the

high price of oil. If the food economy is as dependent on oil as

I'm

suggesting, we need to get the food economy off of fossil fuel and

back onto the sun. We have to in effect " re-solarize " our

food chain

by getting animals off of feedlots, where they are eating grain

and

competing with people for grain.

We need to develop organic agriculture, which helps sequester

carbon

and reduces the need for fossil fuel in the form of synthetic

fertilizers. We need to move towards a more sustainable, more

solar-

based agriculture. That will take a lot of price pressure off,

because so much of the underlying, expensive input in agriculture

is

oil. So you have a situation today where SUVs in America are

competing with eaters around the rest of the world for good food

and

arable land. You can imagine who's going to win.

So getting agriculture off of oil-- that's a long-term process. In

the short-term, it's not like you're going to see a price

difference. Organic produce isn't going to be cheaper because the

two food economies kind of track each other in price. But if you

could remove that ingredient, the fossil fuel ingredient, from

much

of our food, I think that would help.

Most of this grain we're talking about is being fed to animals. So

meat-eating is a tremendous part of this problem too, and

specifically the meat eating increase that we see in places like

China and India. They want to eat meat the way we do. Well, here

in

America, we're eating over 200 pounds of meat per person per year.

When you factor in people not eating meat, that's an obscene

amount

of meat. That's meat at three meals a day, just about. So one way

to

take pressure off these grain stocks is to start eating the grain

and not feeding it to animals and not feeding it to cars. We have

to

remember that the arable land in this world is a precious and

finite

resource, and we should be using it to grow food for people, not

for

cars and animals.