Food or fuel

Over the weekend, I attended a 30-year high school class reunion of my wife's suburban K.C. Shawnee Mission South High School class of '77. During the computer "slide show," interspersed with pictures of students, football games, cheerleaders, etc., were snapshots of the world as it existed back then. Along with several shots of President Jimmy Carter in various settings, one picture showed an attendant at a service station raising gas prices -- ALL THE WAY TO 52.9 CENTS PER GALLON.

Those are officially the good old days for my generation, I suppose. Pretty soon I will be buying the "Malt Shop Memories" Collection from Time Life Records.

This column talks about how the U.S. is passing a threshold in relation to the cost of food. Called "The Impending Food Fight," the article by Davis Hanson looks at the tension between agricultural production for food versus fuel. Hanson also speculates that f/v have increased in price in part because of increased immigration enforcement at the border.

From the column:

The pubic furor over illegal immigration has, despite all the government inaction, still translated into some increased border security. And with more vigilance, fewer illegal aliens are crossing the border to work in labor-intensive crops like fresh fruits and vegetables.
The U.S. population still increases while suburbanization continues. The sprawl of housing tracts, edge cities and shopping centers insidiously gobbles up prime farmland at the rate of hundreds of thousands of acres per year.
In turn, in the West periodic droughts and competition from growing suburbs have made water for farming scarcer, more expensive - and sometimes unavailable.
On the world scene, 2 billion Indians and Chinese are enjoying the greatest material improvement in their nations' histories - and their improved diets mean more food consumed than ever before.
The result is that global food supplies are also tightening up, both at home and abroad. America has become a net food importer. We seem to have developed a new refined taste for foreign wines, cheeses and fresh winter fruits even as we are consuming more of our corn, wheat, soybeans and dairy products at home.
Now comes the biofuels movement. For a variety of reasons, ranging from an attempt to become less dependent on foreign oil to a desire for cleaner fuels, millions of acres of farmland are being redirected to corn-based ethanol.
If hundreds of planned new ethanol refineries are built, the U.S. could very shortly be producing around 30 billion gallons of corn-based fuel per year, using one of every four acres planted to corn for fuel. This dilemma of food or fuel is also appearing elsewhere in the world as Europeans and South Americans begin redirecting food acreages to corn-, soy-, or sugar- based biofuels.


TK: The author wonders how consumers will balance spending for fuel and food and have any left over for consumer goods. With more than 92 million acres of corn planted - 19% more than last year - farmers are trying to ease both food and fuel prices as quickly as they can. There does not appear to be an easy answer for America's agricultural employers. If immigration reform is not passed by Congress, labor shortages will likely limit harvest and raise fresh produce prices in coming years.