Hungry planet

Iain - 'when the words global and warming appear together I feel an irresistable urge to post' - Murray:

A colleague of mine who has followed Brown’s utterances for many years suggests that this “may be the first time he’s ever been right about anything.” Yet he is certainly correct here. Corn ethanol is a boondoggle of gigantic proportions, foisted on the American public by an uncompetitive corn ethanol industry that sees the global warming scare as its lifeline. And this boondoggle harms the world’s poor, not just working Americans who have to pay more for gas. A responsible Congress would cut the ethanol mandate and subsidy to nothing.

Looks like Lester Brown uttered a few more words than just those:

Brown expects the food crisis to get much worse as more and more land becomes exhausted, soil erodes, water becomes scarcer, and global warming cuts harvests.

Making cars more fuel-efficient, and eating less meat would help but the only long-term solution is to enable poor countries - and especially their poorest people - to grow more food. And the best way to do that, studies show, is to encourage small farmers to grow crops in environmentally friendly ways.

Not so sure if Murray or his college qould agree to those recommendations.

Either way, I had no idea we're so low on worldwide food production. Hmmph.