Even if all the corn grown in the US was used for fuel, it would replace only one out of six gallons.

Ethanol has been touted as the solution to our energy and climate crises. But, turning corn into fuel only compounds global hunger. America cannot build our own energy security on the back of people living in poverty—it is morally indefensible and wrong for our own energy, climate, and national security interests. We have an opportunity right now to press the pause button on misguided US corn ethanol policy by telling the EPA to waive the corn ethanol mandate.

Ethanol is not the answer to our oil dependency. Even if all the corn grown in the US was used for fuel, it would replace only one out of six gallons. Ethanol is also not the answer to our changing climate—which itself is driving food prices higher. Corn sounds all natural, but between massive changes in land use needed to grow corn for fuel and the energy costs to process that corn into ethanol, it is hardly greenhouse gas neutral.

Meanwhile, ethanol is contributing to global hunger. Last year, 40 percent of corn grown in the US went to fuel instead of food. If all the land used to grow biofuels for the EU in 2008 had instead been used to grow food, it could have fed 127 million people for an entire year. Major land grabs are happening all over the world, often propelled by the market’s demand for biofuels, leaving marginalized communities without access to traditional land and water to grow food.

Hunger is a moral issue, an economic issue, a health issue, and a national security issue. There were riots around the world in 2008 when food prices spiked. Right now, Yemen is in the grips of a terrible food crisis—almost half of the population is hungry, including one million children. It is not in our national security interest to have people starving in Yemen or in any fragile state.

The governors of North Carolina and Arkansas have asked the EPA to waive the renewable fuel standards mandate, which requires at least 10 percent of unleaded gasoline be made from ethanol. Waiving the corn ethanol mandate will lead to an estimated 7.4 percent drop in global corn prices, which will in turn lower prices for meat, milk, eggs, and more. For people living in poverty who spend up to 75 percent of their income on food, this small change can make a big impact.

The EPA has opened up a public comment period on the waiver, which ends October 11, and so far, more than 5,000 Oxfam supporters have responded. Send in a comment today and stand up for the one billion people who go to bed hungry every day.

Credit: Oxfam America Action Corps and  Grazioso Pictures Inc.

Last week, I managed an (almost) zero mile meal. My backyard chickens provided eggs for a crustless quiche, flavored by garden-grown cherry tomatoes and basil, with freshly dug roasted potatoes on the side. The food was all local—almost. You need olive oil, salt and pepper to flavor, well, everything. And for dessert there was coffee and chocolate, wonderful foods that don’t grow so well in Massachusetts—but that do come in fair trade varieties that ensure small-scale farmers and farm workers around the world get a fair deal.

The meal was a reminder that “Eating Local” is just one part of the food justice equation. Buying fair trade is another. And there are many more. As Oxfam prepares to mark World Food Day on October 16, we’re thinking a lot about all the components of food justice. We hope you’ll do the same by holding a World Food Day meal and talking about how you can fight world hunger from your kitchen table.

Oxfam’s GROW Campaign recently released a report, Food Transformations, which detailed the power of consumers to contribute to global food security. For instance, meat production alone takes up eight percent of the world’s water supply. If a family of four substituted lentil burgers for beef burgers for just one night, they would save the equivalent of 17 bathtubs full of water. That is a small change with a powerful impact. To help consumers harness this power, Oxfam has launched the GROW Method, five easy ways to feed your family healthy and delicious meals while ensuring everyone on the planet has enough to eat, always.

The steps seem simple and straightforward: waste less food, eat local and seasonal, support small farmers worldwide, eat less meat, and cook smart. But nothing is simple when it comes to the politics of  the plate. When the USDA raised the idea of employees participating in Meatless Monday this summer, it sparked a political firestorm. Meanwhile, a stalled Farm Bill threatens to harm food security from Michigan to Mali, and ethanol mandates are requiring much needed food to be used as fuel. As food prices rise and Oxfam and other organizations warn of a potential global food crisis, the price of political and personal inaction also rises. Order our free World Food Day 2012 resources, and consider holding a World Food Day Meal to celebrate the culture and community, power and politics of food.

This guest blog was written by Shawnee Hoover, policy advisor, Oxfam America.

After a long, hard-fought battle, the $6 billion tax break for corn ethanol known as VEETC (or the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit), has lapsed after Congress passed on extending it. And as a result, a collective sigh of relief may be heard around the world by hunger advocates, as one burden is lifted on high food prices and hunger.

In Washington, the ethanol industry is spinning the loss as a win, claiming they voluntarily gave up the tax credit for the good of the nation. The ethanol industry’s most prominent representative, Bob Dinneen of the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA), spun the defeat by claiming to be “the first industry ever to give up a tax credit” saying their “sacrifice” came willingly for the “greater good.” The truth is that the industry fought tooth and nail for every last dollar right up to the end in 2011.

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Headline: Kenya develops unique Bio-Ethanol Gel Biofuel for Kitchen Use,: “resulting in a viscous yellow liquid that burns slowly with a high heat output…”

Meanwhile, in the USA:

Headline: Feds announce recall of more ethanol fuel gel products: “The recall was made due to serious risks of flash fire and burns when consumers add pourable gel to an already-burning fire pot, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission… is aware of 65 incidents resulting in two deaths and 34 victims who were hospitalized with second degree burns of the face, chest, hands, arms or legs.”

So…Kenya develops a bio-ethanol gel just as ethanol fuel gel products are being taken off the shelves in the US because they are not safe.

Is there any chance that there’s a consumer protection agency in Kenya that could catch this potential risk?

A jatropha plantation in Mozambique where crops are used to produce biofuels. Photo by Brett Eloff/Oxfam America.

Senate votes overwhelmingly to end the ethanol tax credit immediately.

Today the Senate voted 73 to 27 to end the VEETC in July, even though it was scheduled to expire at the end of the year anyway.

At the same, time, the House voted overwhelmingly to prohibit new government investment in ethanol infrastructure. By a vote of 283 to 128, the House voted to prohibit any new spending on pumps and storage facilities for ethanol.

Neither is law and the final result is not yet known. Legislative process has many twists and turns. But both votes send a strong signal that the days of endless ethanol subsidies could soon be over.

On the floor of the US Senate, the struggle has begun that may eventually lead to a serious re-think of US biofuels policy. Yesterday was the first skirmish.

Budget pressures are driving the discussion at the moment, with the expensive ethanol tax credits on the chopping block. The famous budget-cutting Senator from Oklahoma, Tom Coburn (R), offered an amendment with Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to end the $6b tax credit. The issue got contentious and wrapped up in partisan procedural complaints. The amendment lost on a vote of 40-59.

While budget pressures loom large, other factors are also driving the need to review the US policies around biofuels. Last week, the US Department of Agriculture announced new projections for corn harvests and prices. The message was to expect high prices and small stockpiles. As one observer said, “It looks like [corn] prices are going to stay high for another year. The food versus fuel debate is going to hot up.” For the first time, more US corn will go to producing ethanol than to feeding livestock.

At the same time, the purported economic benefits of the US investment in ethanol are coming under scrutiny. While ethanol supporters, including US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, claim that the industry supports 400,000 US jobs. Other economists are estimating something more like 46,000. That’s nearly an order of magnitude smaller. And others argue that ethanol and high corn prices aren’t translating into a rural revival.

More votes are expected in the Senate on ethanol subsidies in the near future, and later this year in the House of Representatives.

This all points to a sea-change in the public debate around US biofuels policy and a confirmation that the time is ripe for new ideas and reforms. Good news for the GROW campaign which made reforming biofuels policy a key objective of the effort.

This afternoon Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack will speak at the National Press Club in Washington on global food security ahead of the G-20 Agricultural Ministerial in Paris later this month. A quick glance at the USDA media advisory indicates that those looking for “coherence” in US policies on food security may be disappointed:

“Vilsack will discuss how the continued innovation and creativeness of scientists, farmers and policymakers is essential to confront the combined challenges of feeding a growing global population, mitigating the effects of climate change, and meeting increasing energy demands at home and abroad. The Secretary will also address the importance of maintaining open, transparent markets for trading food and agricultural goods, as well as address misconceptions about the production of U.S. biofuels.”

That last line describes in short order the challenges we face. On one hand the US has been a global leader in dealing with the emerging food crisis, championing investment in small holder farmers through Feed the Future and pledges made in 2009 at L’Aquila, beginning to address the challenges farmers face due to climate change, taking important initial steps to rein in excessive commodity speculation through the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, and pushing for increased transparency in food stocks at the G-20 that will help cut back on price volatility.

But at the same time US policies are undermining the very initiatives we are investing in. Take the suite of ethanol incentives that Secretary Vilsack seems poised to defend again this afternoon. This $6 billion dollars in taxpayer funded giveaways drive 40% of the US corn crop- 15% of global corn production- into ethanol, helping push food prices to record heights. The World Bank estimates that high food prices have sent 44 million people into poverty in recent months.

As Secretary Vilsack speaks this afternoon, I hope he will push aside the failed ideas of the past and embrace the burgeoning consensus that we need to change how business is done here in Washington. Already there is strong bipartisan momentum for reform to our biofuels incentives that could take some of the pressure off of prices. Votes are scheduled in the Senate this week to end the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit, and to prohibit certain funding for ethanol pumps and storage tanks.

Secretary Vilsack’s speech will call for innovation and creativeness in the face of immense challenges. There would be no better sign of innovation than the Secretary’s full-throated support for these reforms.

Learn more about Oxfam’s work to fight global hunger.

As I wrote a few weeks back, Senator Coburn lit a fire in the ethanol debate with a proposal to eliminate the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (VEETC), the troublesome subsidy given to ethanol blenders that keeps demand for biofuels artificially high. After he agreed to pull the bill before it was voted on last month and worked with Senator Feinstein, who had crafted a similar piece of legislation, a new proposal was introduced in the Senate on Wednesday. The Ethanol Subsidy and Tariff Repeal Act would eliminate VEETC by July 1.

The tax credit is not set to expire until the end of the year, but the fight is getting heated. In response to the Coburn/Feinstein proposal, Senator Grassley introduced his own proposal that would cut, though not eliminate, ethanol subsidies, an idea the ethanol industry has embraced.

Accompanying this latest effort is the announcement by the FAO that food prices for the month of April remain at historically high levels. Prices remained virtually unchanged in April, though the price of cereal grains, corn in particular, shot up as a result of bad weather in the US. The ethanol lobby will tell you biofuels (and biofuel mandates) have nothing to do with global grain prices. Unbiased experts have a different opinion (.pdf) though.

Maize that will be stored in a village grain bank in Malawi. Food prices for the month of April remained at historically high levels. Photo by Carlo Heathcote/Oxfam.

And even if you don’t buy the argument that our (artificially high) demand for biofuels is behind at least some piece of food price issues, VEETC is just plain expensive (at a time when Congress has vowed to radically reduce government spending). According to one estimate, total government support for ethanol between 2006 and 2012 averaged roughly $10 billion per year (.pdf).

We’re not the only ones on board with Coburn and Feinstein’s effort to repeal VEETC. Fifty organizations signed on their support to the legislation. It’s a shame that ideological rigidity is keeping more critics of our flawed biofuels policy from supporting Senators Coburn and Feinstein.

Yesterday, President Obama sent a letter to congressional leadership urging them to eliminate unwarranted tax breaks to the oil and gas industry in light of high gas prices. This is a common sense step to deal with our energy challenges. But oil prices aren’t the only prices hitting American wallets hard. Volatile food prices that have rocketed to new heights have also lead to major consequences for American consumers and poor people around the globe. Luckily, the President’s letter offers a pretty strong foundation for some concrete steps he could take to deal with the impact of high food prices: cut subsidies to the ethanol industry that drive price volatility. In that spirit, here’s a little thought experiment on what such a letter might look like:

Dear Speaker Boehner, Senator Reid, Senator McConnell, and Representative Pelosi:

I am writing to urge you to take immediate action to eliminate unwarranted tax breaks for the oil and gas
ethanol industry, and to use those dollars to invest in reducing the crushing burden of high and volatile food prices on the poor clean energy to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

High oil and gasoline and volatile food prices are weighing on the minds and pocketbooks of every American family and the nearly one billion people who go hungry every day. While our economy has begun to recover, with 1.8 million private sector jobs created over the last 13 months, too many Americans are still struggling to find a job or simply just to pay the bills. The recent steep increase in food prices, driven by increased global demand and compounded by unrest and supply disruptions across the globe in the Middle East, has only added to those struggles, and undermined global stability and security. If sustained, these high and volatile prices have the potential to drive tens of millions more into hunger and poverty, put our national security at risk, and slow down the pace of our economy’s growth at precisely the moment when we need to be accelerating it.

While there is no silver bullet to address rising gas food prices in the short term, there are steps we can take to ensure the American people and people in poverty don’t fall victim to skyrocketing gas food prices over the long term. One of those steps is to eliminate unwarranted tax breaks to the oil and gas ethanol industry and invest that revenue into energy to reduce our dependence on foreign oil increasing economic opportunity for poor people. Our outdated tax laws currently provide the oil and gas ethanol industry more than $4 $6 billion per year in these subsidies, even though oil food prices are high and the industry is projected to report outsized profits this quarter. In fact, in the past CEO’s of the major oil food companies made it clear that high oil food prices provide more than enough profit motive to invest in domestic exploration and production without special tax breaks. As we work together to reduce our deficits, we simply can’t afford these wasteful subsidies, and that is why I proposed to eliminate them in my FY11 and FY12 budgets.

I was heartened that Speaker Boehner yesterday expressed openness to eliminating true bipartisan support exists to eliminate these tax subsidies for the oil and gas ethanol industry. Our political system has for too long avoided and ignored this important step, and I hope we can come together in a bipartisan manner to get it done.

In addition, we need to get to work immediately on the longer term goal of reducing our dependence on foreign oil without negative impacts on food security, poverty and global stability and ending our vulnerability to price fluctuations this dependence creates. Without a comprehensive energy strategy for the future we will stay stuck in the same old pattern of heated political rhetoric when prices rise and apathy and neglect when they fall again.

I recently laid out my approach to a comprehensive strategy in my US Global Development Strategy which includes important initiatives including Feed the Future and a Global Climate Change initiative which will invest in increased agricultural productivity and help protect poor people from increasingly extreme weather conditions caused by climate change. Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future, which includes safe and responsible production of our domestic oil and gas resources and doubling down on fuel efficiency in the transportation sector while investing in everything from wind and solar to biofuels and natural gas. None of you will agree with every aspect of this strategy. But I am confident that, in many areas, we can work together to help show the American people that we can make progress on an energy policy that creates jobs and makes our country more secure.

And I hope we can all agree that, instead of continuing to subsidize yesterday’s energy sources, we need to invest in tomorrow’s. We need to invest in a 21st century clean energy economy that won’t undermine food security and global stability and will keep America competitive. In the long term, that’s the answer. That’s the key to helping families avoid pain at the grocery store and the gas pump and reducing our dependence on foreign oil.

Sincerely,

Barack Obama

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