Yesterday, George Bush announced the release of $200 million in emergency food aid to help combat the rapidly spreading hunger in many poorer countries. While President Bush is doing the humanitarian thing by offering aid to those in need, he, along with Congress continue to ignore the underlying problem. Legislation in the United States and other wealthy countries aimed at reducing carbon emissions are a principle cause of these food shortages. In order to appease the climate alarmists, our world leaders (some of whom are alarmists themselves) have mandated turning our global food supply into fuel.

The world’s food situation is bleak, and shortsighted policies in the United States and other wealthy countries — which are diverting crops to environmentally dubious biofuels — bear much of the blame.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the price of wheat is more than 80 percent higher than a year ago, and corn prices are up by a quarter. Global cereal stocks have fallen to their lowest level since 1982.

Yet the most important reason for the price shock is the rich world’s subsidized appetite for biofuels. In the United States, 14 percent of the corn crop was used to produce ethanol in 2006 — a share expected to reach 30 percent by 2010. This is also cutting into production of staples like soybeans, as farmers take advantage of generous subsidies and switch crops to corn for fuel.

The benefits of this strategy are dubious. A study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development suggested that — absent new technologies — the United States, Canada and the European Union would require between 30 percent and 70 percent of their current crop area if they were to replace 10 percent of their transport fuel consumption with biofuels.

This is an issue I had touched on last month, indicating that ethanol is not the answer to our dependency on foreign oil. Government mandates have contributed to many farmers to utilize lands for corn as opposed to other crops. This in turn leads to shortages in crops such as soy, while having the duel effect of increasing consumer prices due to the artificially created market for corn products.

What the climate alarmists have done, in conjunction with their enablers in the United States Congress is take the fictional problem of man made global warming and turn it into the very real problem of worldwide hunger. I suppose this vindicates those alarmists who have claimed that global warming has the potential to kill millions of people, although it isn’t the warming itself that will cause it, rather poor judgment on the part of those who bought into the theory.

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Features, Global Warming, Liberals