Taken from the Food First web site:

Presidential candidates continue to promote agrofuels as food prices rise

As the presidential candidates posture for the all-important Super Tuesday, what are they saying—and not saying—about the current explosion in food prices? How do they address fuel versus food and farming issues? Do their ideas represent steps toward or steps away from the ideal of food sovereignty?

Unfortunately, most candidates appear to be asleep at the wheel and are either ignorant, or ignore the fact that the agrofuels boom has led to an average rise of 30% in the cost of bread, milk, and eggs. The world is down to only 54 days of grain reserves… the lowest on record. This is largely thanks to the U.S. demand from ethanol that has jumped from 54 to 81 million tons over the last year—more than two times the global growth in grain demand.(1) The ethanol industry owes its existence to taxpayer subsidies, so we are paying to fuel our rising food prices. Thus far not one candidate has pointed out this perverse irony.

Leading up to the Iowa caucus, the leading Democratic candidates clamored to out-do each other’s sponsorship plans for corn-based ethanol. Clinton and Obama are promoting targets for the domestic production of 60 billion gallons of biofuels by 2030, each with schemes to boost infrastructure and research and development as well.

Energy independence is an enviable goal. However, it is doubtful that corn-based ethanol, when viewed in its complete cycle, produces any energy at all. The most complete study calculates that it consumes 29% more fossil fuel energy than it generates.(2) According to the Economist Magazine, ethanol is the primary reason that grain prices have soared to record levels(3)—a trend which may prove disastrous for the world’s poor. Even if corn ethanol did yield significant amounts of energy, the laundry list of environmental effects includes increased soil erosion, more herbicides and insecticides, and more pollution of ground and river water than any other crop.(4) And the wastewater and emissions caused by the ethanol refineries—render the use of adjectives such as “clean” and “renewable” to describe biofuels bafflingly inappropriate.

Republicans, in a balancing act between pledging allegiance to free market principles on the one hand, and helping out well-connected agrobusinesses on the other, also voice support for the corn-ethanol industry, but are sometimes unclear about the government’s role in the business. The only candidate to flat-out reject ethanol subsidies is the maverick libertarian, Ron Paul. John McCain had once denounced the subsidies as “highway robbery” in a surprisingly candid diatribe back in November 2003:

"Ethanol is a product that would not exist if Congress did not create an artificial market for it. No one would be willing to buy it. Yet thanks to agricultural subsidies and ethanol producer subsidies, it is now a very big business—tens of billions of dollars that have enriched a handful of corporate interests, primarily one big corporation, Archer Daniels Midland. Ethanol does nothing to reduce fuel consumption, nothing to increase our energy independence, nothing to improve air quality."(5)

Three years later, as a candidate, McCain changed his line in a speech at Grinnell, Iowa: “I support ethanol and I think it is a vital, a vital alternative energy source not only because of our dependency on foreign oil, but its greenhouse gas reduction effects.”(6) He has since qualified his stance by saying he supports the industry, but not the subsidies. But since it would not be feasible to make ethanol without the subsidies, his position is either misinformed or else misleading.

The Democrats, as the party of labor, talk of tying labor and environmental protections to trade agreements. Kucinich brought the issue into the center of his campaign, stating that he would withdraw from the WTO and NAFTA to start a new trade paradigm based on worker’s rights and environmental protection. His competitors expressed milder views in an interview with the Iowa Fair Trade Campaign.(7) Clinton told them that trade agreements need “strong, enforceable labor and environmental provisions” but she did not elaborate nor mention the topic on her website. Edwards and Obama both say that trade deals should include the International Labor Organization’s “core” labor rights expressed in their eight fundamental conventions. If the candidates are serious, they should develop this line of thinking further, asking if those core rights go far enough and how they can best be enforced. After all, the fact that Colombia has signed onto the eight fundamental conventions, officially protecting the right to collective bargaining, does not prevent it from being the most lethal place in the world for union organizers to work.

Clinton and Obama both advocate capping the subsidies for farmers at $250,000 per year in order to show, in the words of Obama “that we help family farmers—not large corporate agribusiness.”(8) Although this cap is not a bad idea, the centrality they give to it seems misplaced. These subsidies only go to growers of a handful of commodities, 80% of whom receive less than $10,000 per year.(9) Capping the subsidies obviously does nothing to help small farmers, nor the growers of hundreds of other crops that are not covered at all by subsidies. Nor does the cap pose a serious challenge to the agribusiness corporations that have progressively squeezed farmers over the last half-century. In 1954 farmers brought home 37 cents of every dollar consumers spent on food. By 2000 their share had dropped to just 19 cents of that food dollar.(10) A system of price supports—such as the grain reserves, acreage set-asides, and government commodity purchases that kept prices at more reasonable levels in the U.S. from the Great Depression until 1973—would do a better job than today's narrow direct payments at keeping family farming viable in America. Unfortunately that is not on the agenda.

The leading Democrats also differ from their more conservative counterparts in advocating a host of less controversial issues that could bring about some important incremental changes. Each is calling for an expansion of the Food Stamps Program, which would be particularly timely right now as an economic stimulus. Obama advocates tougher enforcement of anti-trust laws with respect to the agricultural sector. For instance, he would like to ban the ownership of livestock by meatpackers because of the potential for price manipulation. Obama would also like to see stricter regulation of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO's), particularly those smelly hog farm lagoons that pollute ground and surface water. The two also share a concern for setting up more incentives for farmers to practice conservation. Edwards had a unique plan for granting up to $8 billion in carbon credits to farmers who decrease greenhouse gases with practices such as no-till soil sequestration, reforestation, methane capture from manure, residue mulching, buffer zones, and cover crops.(11) Edwards was also alone in stressing food safety concerns like increasing inspections, especially of imported foods, and integrating the various regulatory agencies. But such proposals fall short of Kuchinich's lone cry for the increased regulation and labeling of genetically modified food. Obama has a program to encourage and assist young farmers. Finally, last May, Clinton co-sponsored a provision in the Farm Bill called Food Outreach and Opportunities Development (FOOD) for a Healthy America Act which would expand Community Food Projects, make it easier for schools to get fresh fruits and vegetables as well as locally produced foods, and boost farmer's markets, in part by making Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards from the Food Stamps program an accepted form of payment.

Now that they have styled themselves as champions of change, might one of these Democratic candidates wrestle control of our food system away from the big agribusinesses and transform it into an environmentally sustainable agriculture with reasonable returns for small farmers and healthy food for consumers? Although that is not likely to happen, we will certainly not make progress towards that change if we do not continue to scrutinize all politicians and hold them accountable to the needs of all Americans to have access to healthy and affordable food.

http://www.foodfirst.org/node/1825