EU "green" policies uproot poor Africans.

Wealthy European nations are uprooting poor Africans from their homes in order to take the land to grow biofuels. In the name of the “saving the planet” they are once again attacking the poorest of the poor.

Joint deals between African governments and European governments are pushing farmers off their land so that it may be confiscated for biofuel projects. As typical of such arrangement the governments are giving the major biofuel corporations sweetheart deals.

For instance, in Tanzania the government has give the British corporation Sun Biofuels, 22,230 acres of farmland for the next 99 years. In exchange the company is supposed to invest $20 million in local infrastructure. If you are interested that means the “rent” for the land amounts to $9.08 per year per acre!

Der Spiegel reports:

Sun Biofuels is not alone. In fact, half a dozen other companies from the Netherlands, the United States, Sweden, Japan, Canada and Germany have already sent their scouts to Tanzania. Prokon, a German company known primarily for its wind turbines, has already begun growing jatropha curcas on a large scale. It expects to have 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres) -- an area about the size of Luxembourg -- under cultivation throughout Tanzania soon.

A gold rush mentality has taken hold -- not just in East Africa but across the entire continent. In Ghana, the Norwegian firm Biofuel Africa has secured farming rights for 38,000 hectares (93,860 acres), and Sun Biofuels is also doing business in Ethiopia and Mozambique.

Kavango BioEnergy, a British company, plans to invest millions of euros in northern Namibia. Western companies are turning up in Malawi and Zambia, where they plan to produce diesel fuel and ethanol from jatropha curcas, palm oil or sugar cane. Foreign investors have their eye on 11 million hectares (27 million acres) in Mozambique -- more than one-seventh of the country's total area -- for growing energy plants. The government in Ethiopia has even made 24 million hectares (59 million acres) available.

All this is to produce fuels which are so cost-ineffective that they require subsidies to exist. Governments in the West are taking the hard-earned income of working people in order to transfer it to wealthy corporate interests who are working with “enviro friendly” politicians. Those corporations then use a small amount of that subsidize to steal the land of poor people in Africa in order to grow more crops for bio fuels.

This alliance of corporate interests, Western politicians and corrupt African governments pay no attention to what their policies to do poor people. Der Spiegel says: “In none of these places are the needs of local residents taken into account.” In one rural area of Tanzania “thousands of residents are being forced to move to make way for the Swedish company Sekab’s plans to grow sugarcane, a highly water-intensive crop, on at least 9,000 hectares (22,230 acres) and then distill it into ethanol.” According to the report the residents have received no compensation and were told they will “get what you are entitled to” but no information is available. I suggest, based on my experiences living in Africa, that the residents will get nothing.

As land is gobbled up by the corporate/government alliances of the West less land will be available for the production of food for local consumption. This means the poor in Africa are getting shafted by Western politicians twice. First, the entire subsidy program on biofuels has forced up food prices dramatically. The World Bank says this subsidy program “to save the planet” is responsible for 75% of the increase in food costs in recent years. So the subsidies are forcing up food prices everywhere, including Africa. Secondly, the subsidies are being used to steal land from peasant farmers in Africa thus depriving them of their ability to feed themselves.

So the poor in Africa get hit first with higher food prices on the world market and then they get hit again as their own farming land is stolen to be given to wealthy, politically-connected Western corporations.

Please note that Left-wing parties are supportive of these programs. Once again the Left-wing agenda is easily subverted to serve the bottom line of corporate interests. The Left just never learns that state power is rarely used for the poor but almost always ends up in the hands of the rich and powerful. The expansion of state powers is precisely what corporations need -- not laissez faire markets. If the Left wanted to strip corporations of their ability to do harm, such as what is now being down in Africa, then they should cut the regulations, cut the subsidies and put the corporations in a competitive marketplace.

In a competitive marketplace these wealth “ethanol” corporations are unlikely to exist. They are politically created monsters and, while they hurt everyone, they harm the poorest, most vulnerable people the most. And they do so with the complicit assistance of the political Left. Historically the Left has to realize that by relying on state power to accomplish worthy goals they far too often end up stealing from the poor in order to give to the rich.

Don't feel sorry for the ethanol hogs.

The New York Times has a short piece regarding Texas asking the Environmental Protection Agency for a waiver on the use of the ethanol. Of course the ethanol hogs, feeding at the government trough, are livid over the idea.

Yet some of those who will lose their place on the government gravy train do have legitimate concerns. One company complain that it wouldn’t have spent millions on piping without the governments mandated increases in the use of ethanol.

One farmer said: “We bought fertilizer and corn seed, decide our crop mix on the basis of ethanol being where it was. To change the mandate in the middle of our growing season, that’s really not right.” He apparently never worried if the mandate was right in the first place.

Government intervention constantly screws up the private plans of citizens. Government planning does not impose planning where chaos ruled. It imposes one crude plan in place of millions of micro-plans set up by the people. It substitutes a plan by a politician for the millions of plans by individuals.

When politicians pushed the ethanol boondoggle they messed up the plans of lots of people. For instance, they are starving poor people to death in Third World nations because they have push up food prices artificially by consuming vast amounts of food to produce ethanol. Those poor people didn’t plan on starving to death but Hillary and Obama and the majority of the US Congress decided that buying the votes of well-off farmers was more important than a bunch of poor people starving to death.

Others who are are not starving are still financially hurting because of the moves. Families that planned one budget suddenly had to start cutting things out, in the middle of their financial year, because well-off farmers got hoggish with government subsidies. The businessmen and farmers now complaining about a change in the policy didn’t see anything wrong with upsetting the plans of others when they helped push these subsidies through.

The very individuals who are now complaining about how a change in policy is upsetting their plans advocated the policies which upset the plans of hundreds of millions of other people. They didn’t care then so why should we care now?

On the surface it sounds reasonable for them to complain that they made certain investments based on the returns promised by politicians. Changing those plans now will be detrimental to them. But so what? First, their profits were being stolen from working people by government force. What they are whining about is that they might not be able to mug the taxpayers any longer.

If you are walking down a dark street and someone puts a knife to your throat he has plans for your money. If you use Mace on him you might just foil all the plans he had made. But he had no right to make plans with your money.

And the farmers and corporate interests that were getting rich off of ethanol had no right to make plans with your money either. Personally I think it a good thing when we foil the plans of robbers, thieves and political muggers.

This ethanol issue also shows how pernicious the argument used by conservative Bob Barr, presidential candidate for the (formerly) Libertarian Party. Barr wanted to bail out FannieMae and FreddieMac because government had been so heavily involved in the housing bubble that it helped create the crisis we are now facing.

Government did. Just like it created the food crisis with ethanol, the energy crisis with numerous policies, the drug cartel problem with drug prohibition, the illiteracy problem with state education, the congestion problem with socialized roading and a host of problems.

People make plans based on the current political realities. Government forces people to change those plans. And a series of state interventions usually leads to a crisis. But if we were to bail out every industry that was negatively effected by government policy we would have 100% federal bailouts. Every industry would be eligible.

If we want government to mitigate the bad results of every policy it has passed there would be no end of government interference. People who advocate state intervention to mitigate bad policies are no different than the people who advocated the bad policies in the first place. First, none of them argued their policies were bad. They all felt they were justified for some greater good.

And the Barr interventionists are ignoring the main lesson from such debacles: government intervention, no matter the intentions, leads to unintended consequences. Barr’s solution will itself distort the market even more and lead to further bad consequences. That is the road to serfdom that Hayek warned about. Bad policies lead to bad consequences. These results then are used to justify more policies to mitigate those harms. The new policies lead to further bad consequences thus justifying more intervention. Mises argued that interventionism is socialism by “a series of successive steps.”

And many of these successive steps were justified as remedies for the ill results of previous policies.

Bailing out people who benefited from previous government policies is not libertarian. Their failure, if anything is a bit of justice. It returns some of the booty that they stole back to the productive economy. As such their failure fuels beneficial and productive enterprises.

The ethanol hogs, eating at the through, had no right to the riches they received. They picked those riches out of the pockets of lots of people who were in far worse financial straits. Government intervention almost always robs those who are poorer and less powerful and benefits those who are wealthier and powerful. After all, the political elites love that wealth and power, they need it. So it should be no surprise that government intervention redistributes wealth from the have-nots to the haves.

Now and then the haves end up in trouble because the government program they rely upon is not sustainable. Some, like ethanol subsidies, create massive disasters quickly. Bailing out those who were lining their pockets with stolen money is absurd. Let them fail. Their failure will be a sign to others who hope to get rich by political redistribution. It will help rectify the economic crisis faster if they fail. And it starts to put the stolen money back in the hands where it belonged. After watching the misery inflicted on billions of people by this ethanol policy I can’t muster any sympathy for the ethanol hogs fearing the end of their free ride. It should have come sooner.

Oxfam --- dragging people into poverty.

Bravo for Oxfam, they got this one right. The BBC reports that "Oxfam says so-called policies in developed countries are contributing to the world's soaring food prices, which hit the poor hardest." They report that Oxfam says fuels won't combate climate change.

A spokesman for Oxfam said: "Rich Countries... are making climate change worse, not better, they are stealing crops and land away from food production, and they are destroying millions of livelihoods in the process." The BBC says that the Oxfam report shows that "biofuels have dragged more than 30 million people worldwide into poverty."

I've lived in the Third World and written about how conditions were improving there dramatically for some time. But in a few short years greedy politicians, pandering to Big Agri and Big Energy managed to produce a policy that is good for no one but the politicians and the corporations who benefit from the subsidies and hand-outs. These people are literally starving people to death.

Meanwhile that great advocate of the poor, Barack Obama, is in bed with the very corporate interests who are helping starve people to death. The New York Times reports that Obama has close ties to the ethanol scamsters.

Pandering to the Big Agri Mr. Obama has been endorsing ethanol and the massive handouts that greedy corporations are getting at the expense of taxpayers. Obama's favorite welfare queens wear business suits. Former Democratic Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, often travels with Obama. Daschle went from the halls of Congress straight to serving on the board of "three ethanol companies" and "works at a Washington law firm" where "he spends a substantial amount of time providing strategic and policy advice to clients in renewable energy." The Times also notes that one point Obama was criticized because he flew at "subsidized rates on corporate airplanes, including twice on jets owned by Archer Daniels Midlands, which is the nation's largest ethanol producer" and, I might add, one of the biggest recipients of corporate welfare around.

Apparently Obama does love poor black folk provided they can vote in the election. Then he has compassion. When his pandering to the ethanol lobby leads to pushing millions of black folk in Africa back into poverty Obama doesn't give a damn. Obama's concerns about poverty and hunger don't go far. He's a fraud.

When You're Good to Mama

Earlier today I wrote about how stupid ideas, which make no economic sense, can make political sense due to the warped incentives of bureaucratic or political management. One example which I mentioned was the disastrous use of ethanol as a means of combating global warming. Ethanol is one of those solutions that is wrong at so many levels one doesn’t know where to begin. In a nutshell it is a lousy alternative to petrol. It is worse for the environment, requires subsidies to be produced, is driving up the price of food and is increasing world hunger because of its impact on food prices.

But it makes political sense. The New York Times has just written a piece on ethanol and the Hillary connection. They told of a “Global Initiative” run by her husband, the ex-president and how the stage was filled with three of the richest men in the world and the audience packed with “businessmen hoping for a profit.”

How do you make a profit producing ethanol? You don’t. But you make a profit when you get political hacks to push through legislation to pay you to produce ethanol. Make no mistake about it, ethanol is not a phenomenon of the free market. It is the Frankenstein monster of politicians like Hillary. Anyone who thinks Big Business tends to favor free markets knows nothing about history. Big Business has repeatedly been behind political campaigns to use the State to limit competition and to reward corporations with profits that they couldn’t earn honestly in a free, competitive market.

In reality it is easier to make money through political favors than through the market. By “make money” I don’t mean these people create wealth. They do not! They destroy wealth through a process of political redistribution. But since the wealth tends to get redistributed into their pockets, and the wealth that is destroyed belongs to others, they don’t mind.

The Times told of how Hillary, as the Senator from New York, “had sponsored legislation to provide billions in new federal incentives for ethanol, and, especially in her home state of New York, she had worked to foster a business climate that favors the sort of ethanol investments pursued by her husband’s friends and her political supporters.”

The paper notes the shady connections between the Clintons and this wealth elite of business parasites. Bill Clinton is a paid “adviser” to Yucaipa Companies. The owner of the company, Ronald Burkle, has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Hillary’s political career. Yucaipa has invested millions in Cilion, Inc., a company created to reap profits by being paid to produce ethanol. They are building seven ethanol plants, two of them in New York so Hillary can show how she brought home the bacon. The New York Times writes:

Certainly Mrs. Clinton is doing what would be expected of a senator trying to stimulate a sagging rural economy in her home state, not to mention a presidential candidate mindful of the importance of ethanol in corn-producing places like Iowa. But her actions take on an added dimension when they intersect with Mr. Clinton’s philanthropic and profit-making endeavors, which have periodically raised questions as Mrs. Clinton seeks the Democratic nomination for president.

In fact this is not true at all. They seem to think government can “stimulate a sagging rural economy”. This is the old “broken window fallacy” all over again. What is seen here is the money that Hillary throws into rural New York and no doubt jobs are created. What is ignored by the Times is that the money was taken from the productive sector of the economy and poured into loss-making ventures. Hillary’s intervention created two net losses. It destroyed part of the productive sector while wasting money to produce something that isn’t worth producing -- something which actually has a negative value because it is harming the economy.

Profits can be secured in the political sector through the use of State power to redistribute wealth. The Left seems oblivious to the reality of wealth redistribution in practice. They talk about helping the poor and ignore the fact that political power almost always favors the rich. To redistribute wealth through political power only creates a situation where the poor are fleeced to benefit wealthy elites who have access to cheap politicians like Hillary and her husband.


These corporations scratch Hillary’s back with donations to her campaign and paid positions for her husband. She in turns promotes legislation that robs the taxpayers of America to fund projects which directly benefit the corporate leeches who are in bed with her and Bill. The Times writes:

Under an agreement with Mr. Burkle in 2002, Mr. Clinton was to provide advice and find investment opportunities for several domestic and foreign funds in Yucaipa’s portfolio, and would receive a share of the profits from those funds.

Ask yourself how it is that Bill Clinton has become a financial adviser? Is Mr. Clinton now some sort of investment guru hitherto undiscovered by most people? I sincerely doubt he has sufficient knowledge to direct the investments of billionaires. But he has political connections. Pay off Bill for his “expertise” and Hillary directly benefits -- she had to get the millions she loaned her campaign from somewhere. What Bill Clinton offers these “businessmen” (and I use the term lightly) was access to political power so that they could redistribute money to themselves through the raw use of political power.

The Right seems to think of Big Business as giants of industry. And certainly some corporate leaders have been such, but far fewer than the Right thinks. Far too often they are political parasites who use the State to enrich themselves. This is not the free market but the political process at work.

The Left still entertains the notion that statism, as a process, works. It doesn’t. This naive view regarding political power turns the Left into pawns in the game of corporate leaders who use them to push for legislation that reduces competition and entrenches Big Business into position.

I can’t help but remember how antitrust legislation was pushed through by Big Business who feared upcoming competitors. The Left played along thinking they were reigning in the “excess of greedy capitalism”. In reality the Left were toadies to the very forces they opposed.

When the telephone industry was deregulated a campaign against deregulation was led by two groups: the political Left and the telephone companies. The Left seemed to never pick up on this. The same thing happened with deregulation of trucking and air travel. In both cases the Left and the major corporations in those respective fields opposed deregulation. You’d think that when the Left kept waking up in bed with Big Business they’d eventually cotton on to how politics works. Apparently they haven’t. Of course the Right is equally stupid since many of them haven’t yet seen that their much praised corporate leaders are in bed with the political Left as well.

Classical liberalism promoted free markets. That was truly revolutionary and it had a major impact freeing up those oppressed by the organized forces of conservatism: the state, the feudal lords, and the church. Socialists embraced liberal goals of equality of rights, economic prosperity for all, and individual emancipation. But they found freedom too unsettling. So they concluded that the way to achieve these liberal ends was through conservative means -- the use of state power.

Thus the socialists and progressive broke away from the foundational values of liberalism -- though they continued to call themselves liberals based on their desire for liberal results. But the means and the ends must be consistent with one another. When they are not the result is contrary to the goals being sought.

By embracing statism the socialists have basically betrayed the goals of liberalism. By using state power these socialists have propped up the power elite that liberalism has historically opposed. The feudal lords have been merely replaced by corporate leaders. Liberal ends can not be achieved through the use of conservative means. If socialists and progressives wish to establish a just world they have to reject the use of state power. Until they do they will repeatedly see their icons, like Hillary Clinton, jumping into bed with corporate giants in order to plunder the hard-earned savings of working people. By the way -- if you think Obama would be better think again. He’s even more in favor of this sort of corporatism. I should also note that historically this sort of alliance of Big Business with the State was called fascism. It’s major proponent was a former editor of a Socialist newspaper named Benito Mussolini.

Note: the video above is Queen Latifah's wonderful rendition of When You're Good to Mama from the musical Chicago. I post it in honor of Hillary Clinton.

Ethanol: The Corn God

A five minute presentation on the myths of ethanol with John Stossel.

Save the planet. Starve the World.

Damn the lot of them. I mean politicians, do-gooders and Nanny statists. This lot of meddling, superior, wankers who are absolutely convinced that they can centrally plan the lives of others better than the people themselves. To save the planet they are starving the world.

A quarter of a century ago the doomsday prophets like Paul Ehrlich were licking their chops over the prospects of massive famine in the world due to depleting resources.

What we saw, for almost the next three decades, was a world where food production increased and starvation was being reduced year after year. In the mid 60s only 42 percent of nations in the world had an average caloric intake of at least 100 percent of daily requirements. One decade later it had risen to 52 percent. One more decade later it had gone up to 66 percent.

When I was a child you often heard: “Eat everything on your plate, people in China are starving.” Sometimes it was India. The point was that people were starving. India and China liberalized their economies and food production exploded.

Years later Ehrlich revised his dire predictions and pointed to Vietnam as a nation where massive famine was around the corner. He showed declines in food production following the imposition of socialism. Ehrlich didn’t blame socialism, he blamed the decline on the lack of resources. But even as Ehrlich’s book was being distributed, Vietnam liberalized and the nation became a food exporter.

For decades we saw more and more hungry people being fed. The world was improving. Life expectancy had been increasing. The amount of severe poverty was declining. Per capita food production was increasing, food prices were dropping and poor people were becoming richer. All in all it looked good.

Then the meddlers came along intent on imposing deadly poverty on the world once again.

Let’s begin with the actions of George Bush, meddler in chief. The stupid invasion of Iraq destablized that country and exacerbated the entire situation in the Middle East. It is hard to imagine a more moronic policy in terms of consequences. One result has been the escalation of the price of oil. By increasing the instability in a major oil producing region of the world Mr. Bush has added to the costs of virtually everything in the world.

My main concern is availability of food. Certainly increased energy costs drive up the cost of food and that means fewer poor people can afford to eat. This is something apparently lost on the do-gooders who want to intentionally drive up energy costs to “save the planet”.

Bush’s foolishness is not the only cause of higher oil prices, of course. While demand for oil is higher, the ready supply of oil is far more than sufficient to meet that demand. The problem isn’t that the resource is becoming so scarce as to drive up prices. The oil is there. Getting to the oil is the problem. And it is a political problem more than a technological one.

People forget that a massive amount of oil is not in the hands of private producers, contrary to the slogans of the loony Left. Most oil is produced by companies controlled by inept, often vicious, politicians. In Russia much of the private production of oil has been renationalized by Putin, a resurrected Stalin of the worst sort. (No wonder Bush praised him.) In Venezuela the clown prince of Maxism, Hugo Chavez, has confiscated oil companies. Such moves always drive up the price of oil. Putin and Chavez are both responsible for increasing starvation in the world.

The planet savers also pushed through one of the worst boondoggles in American history: the push for ethanol to reduce carbon emissions. Now energy needs directly compete with food needs in a way never before possible. Professors C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer in their article How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor which appeared in Foreign Affairs magazine, wrote:

Now, thanks to a combination of high oil prices and even more generous government subsidies, corn-based ethanol has become the rage. There were 110 ethanol refineries in operation in the United States at the end of 2006, according to the Renewable Fuels Association. Many were being expanded, and another 73 were under construction. When these projects are completed, by the end of 2008, the United States' ethanol production capacity will reach an estimated 11.4 billion gallons per year. In his latest State of the Union address, President George W. Bush called on the country to produce 35 billion gallons of renewable fuel a year by 2017, nearly five times the level currently mandated.

This ethanol craze has the support of virtually all the vermin that scurry about the halls of Congress. The Left drool over it because it lessens carbon emissions. The Bushites and neo-cons talk about energy independence and self-sufficiency (an old Mercantilist belief). Politicians from agricultural states love the subsidies because it allows them to bring home the pork to their constituents.

All this nonsense will have an impact on food prices. But, most Americans will be able to handle the additional cost. These higher food prices, for the developed world, mean very little. For the developing world it means the difference between life and death. Runge and Senauer illustrate this point with a telling example. They write that to fill one 25 gallon tank on a vehicle with ethanol:

requires over 450 pounds of corn -- which contains enough calories to feed one person for a year. By putting pressure on global supplies of edible crops, the surge in ethanol production will translate into higher prices for both processed and staple foods around the world. Biofuels have tied oil and food prices together in ways that could profoundly upset the relationships between food producers, consumers, and nations in the years ahead, with potentially devastating implications for both global poverty and food security

The World Food Program has said that the rising price of food means they can’t afford to feed the 90 million people they were helping. Executive Director Josette Sheeran says food costs have risen by 50 percent in the last five years and much of this is due to the biofuel campaign. She said: “We face the tightest agriculture markets in decades and, in some cases, on record.” Thanks, in no small measure to this political interference: “We are no longer in a surplus world.”

The so-called Progressive will try to blame this on capitalism. But this is the political process at work not markets. The Foreign Affairs article notes that this industry is “artificially buoyed by government subsidies, minimum production levels and tax credits” and all this “may soon be dwarfed by the panoply of tax credits, grants and government loans included in energy legislation passed in 2005 and in a farming bill designed to support ethanol producers.”

The same coalition of meddlers at the federal level exists in the various states. So all the government interventions meant to increase corn consumption for ethanol are also being implemented at the state level.

The same sort of bullshit is happening with the, oh-so-warming conscious, political meddlers in the European Union. Eighty percent of all biofuels, in the world, are used within the EU. The EU “promotes the production of ethanol from a combination of sugar beets and wheat with direct and indirect subsidies.” The Guardian reported in 2004: “The European Union wants 2% of the oil we use to be biodiesel by the end of next year, rising to 6% by 2010 and 20% by 2020. To try to meet these targets, the government has reduced the tax on biofuels by 20 pence a litre, while the EU is paying farmers an extra 45 euros a hectare to grow them.”

If one looks at the impact of policies on people in the Third Wold then the European Union is guilty of genocide. Combine their assinine biofuel policies with their agricultural protectionism, and Europe is helping kill millions of people. That the victims are mainly non-Europeans makes one wonder if there is no residual racist sentiments stalking the halls of Brussels. Certainly a racist, intent on killing off the “inferior” races in the Third World, would be hard pressed to design a set of policies, short of actual slaughter, to better accomplish such genocidal goals.

Certainly Europe isn’t the only part of the world caught up in this “green” frenzy. Brazil has mandated that all diesel “contain two percent biodiesel by 2008 and five percent biodiesel by 2013.” And in Asia “vast areas of tropical forest are being cleared and burned to plant oil palms destined for conversion to biodiesel.”

The Guardian article looked at the ramifications of converting to biodiesel and found the policy absurd. “To run our cars and buses and lorries on biodiesel... would require 25.9m hectares. There are 5.7m in the United Kingdom.” They note that even the EU’s requirement to have 20 percent of their fuel from “green” sources “would consume almost all our cropland.” They rightly warned that if this policy spread to other parts of the world the results would “tip the global balance from net surplus to net deficit.” As they wrote: “If the production of biofuels is big enough to affect climate change, it will be big enough to cause global starvation.”

Just a few years of political meddling to save the planet has made a huge difference to the prospects for the world’s poor. Runge and Senauer wrote that a 2003 study they did on world food security, based on then current trends, found, “the number of hungry people throughout the world would decline by 23 percent, to about 625 million, by 2025” provided food prices remained relatively constant. Those were not unrealistic projections. “But if, all other things being equal, the prices of staple foods increased because of demand for biofuels,... the number of food-insecure people in the world would rise by over 16 million for every percentage increase in the real prices of staple foods. That means that 1.2 billion people could be chronically hungry by 2025 -- 600 million more than previously predicted.”

This new “green” biofuel craze could literally double the amount of starvation in the world. For my entire lifetime the world has been making giant strides in feeding the hungry. Starvation, while not eradicated, was being reduced year after year. Yet with just a few years of political meddling the politicians and do-gooders have turned food surpluses into food deficits to save the planet. To “save the planet” they are starving the world.

Note: A five minute video on ethanol myths, with John Stossel, is here.

Picture: Note the book cover promotion biofuel. If you read the subtitle it says "toward a greener and secure energy future." The cover should feature the picture of starving children instead.