Food and fertilizer scarcity vs ethanol madness.

There is a new article in the NY Times about fertilizer shortages. Fertilizer is essential to getting good crop harvests, but demand outpaces supply and prices have risen sharply.

Interesting figures:

From 1900 to 2000, worldwide food production jumped by 600 percent. Scientists said that increase was the fundamental reason world population was able to rise to about 6.7 billion today from 1.7 billion in 1900.

Then this:

“This is a basic problem, to feed 6.6 billion people,” said Norman Borlaug, an American scientist who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his role in spreading intensive agricultural practices to poor countries. “Without chemical fertilizer, forget it. The game is over.”

How on earth our "beloved" leaders in the West think it is a good idea to burn our food, and how they think we have agricultural resources (land, water, fertilizer) to spare, is beyond me. These people are crazy, stark crazy. There is no other way to explain the fact that they passed legislation mandating the use of 10%-15% ethanol (produced from our food crops) in the fuel.

As UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food Jean Ziegler said: "this is a crime against humanity". (A very rare ocasion when I am able to quote a UN person approvingly).

Food security - biofuel madness.

The blog EU referendum has an interesting piece on "Food Security the coming crisis".

The NY Times also writes "A Global Need for Grain That Farms Can’t Fill "

“Everyone wants to eat like an American on this globe,”said Daniel W. Basse of the AgResource Company, a Chicago consultancy. “But if they do, we’re going to need another two or three globes to grow it all.
Food prices are rising sharply and fast, already causing difficulties, especially to the poor people in the world ... A tailor in Lagos, Nigeria, named Abel Ojuku said recently that he had been forced to cut back on the bread he and his family love.

Yet the governments of the EU and US continue with their totally insane policy of biofuel and ethanol mandates. Currently biofuels provide some 5% of automotive fuel, but under existing mandates, they should rise to 20% within a decade.
It won't happen. There simply isn't enough land and agricultural resources (water, fertilizers ) to provide the food we need, let alone biofuel.

Global Warming hasn't caused any tangible damage yet (and is unlikely to, in the future), but global warming hysteria is already harming the hungry people of the world today (not in 2050).
While we debate whether temparatures have risen by some 0.6 deg Celsius over the last hundred years, and whether they are going to rise by another degree or two in the next hundred years - food prices have risen by 40-60% in the last year alone, and that's a fact, not a prediction based on models.

The governments should reverse course, fast, and strictly prohibit the burning of any agricultural products (biofuel, ethanol) as fuel.