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Bart Mongoven is vice president for Stratfor's Public Policy Intelligence Group, guiding the direction of long-range research and analysis as well as overseeing all public policy client projects. Mongoven has an extensive background in the study of activism in Asia, Australia, Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. His international experience covers a wide range of topics, from environmental and human rights organizations to the development of international conventions.The headlong rush toward development of biofuels, especially ethanol made from corn, is causing critics and policy makers to raise some serious questions. Will corn-based ethanol deliver the promised benefits? Is the push toward ethanol -- fueled by huge subsidies in both United States and Europe -- creating a food vs. fuel dilemma? In an article entitled "Biofuels Backlash," Stratfor analyst Bart Mongoven says the criticism is loudest in Europe but is unlikely to have effect on policy either there or in the United States.
Skeptics are "running head-on into the powerful agricultural lobbies in the United States and Europe that so successfully championed the issue in the first place." Mongoven writes. He points out that the environmental groups in the United States that once found little environmental benefit from corn-based ethanol have been silent in recent years as Congress pressed to put greater emphasis on the fuel as a replacement for gasoline. Why? The support of farm-state lawmakers broadens an alliance behind the environmental movement's chief goal: a cap on greenhouse gas emissions.
However, the influence of agricultural interests could ultimately cause some serious setbacks to efforts to move industrialized nations away from carbon fuels -- and have economic consequences for developing countries as well. Brazil, Mongoven points out, makes ethanol from sugar cane that is far more environmentally friendly than the corn-based fuel. But the farm industries both here and in Europe have fought tooth and nail to erect barriers to the import of Brazilian ethanol.
POSTED BY: reenum (September 23, 2007 09:34 AM)
It would seem like fiber would make a better alcohol. The farmers need it for fertilizer, but could harvest it every other year. This would include corn plants, wheat -- every type, dried gathered and put into distilation tanks. The farmers have the land, but people could build cheep distilation plants on it in a co-op. Trucking could also be co-op'ed.
POSTED BY: Tom (September 23, 2007 07:05 PM)
What do people eat in Brazil?
POSTED BY: MEtrash (September 24, 2007 02:18 AM)
The corn used in the production of ethanol is not the sweet corn you eat from the grocery store. It is the already ripened form of the corn kernal which can only be used for ethanol production animal feed and other products (e.g. corn syrup). In fact the corn that is raised for human consumption is not even the same type of corn raised for ethanol and cattle feed. Ethanol corn and cattle feed corn is a hybrid which would not be very tasty to humans even if taken from the stalk for "roasting ears". In the state that it is harvested, the corn is inedible by humans and only by cattle once it is ground. Now comes the next question. One is always hearing that American cattle are grain fed and as such are unhealthy as compared to range fed cattle (e.g bison meat is supposed be more healthy for humans than cattle for this very reason). Range fed cattle are predominantly raised in Australia and Argentina. Both of these countries enjoy a hearty export market to the U.S. where people supposedly rave about their beef. So if the trend is toward range fed beef then why all the grief over corn fed to cattle becoming expensive?
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