Via the World Bank PSD Blog, I'm reading now a long piece in the May/June Foreign Affairs about what might prove to be a major problem with Biofuels.

Chris Monasterski pulls some interesting bits out of the article, including this jarring statistic: "Filling the 25-gallon tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires over 450 pounds of corn – which contains enough calories to feed one person for a year."

I don't think anybody talking about ethanol is really factoring in these details. We're at a moment in American life where we are only beginning to comprehend the fact that there may not be petroleum in the ground to run our cars and air conditioners forever. The idea that the legendary breadbasket of America can somehow point the way to the fantasy of "energy independence" is practically irresistible to policy makers. This has lead to an uncritical embrace of ethanol without any understanding of the complications behind such technology.

The authors of the long Foreign Affairs piece argue essentially that a tight pairing of the price of fuel resources and the price of food staples such as corn used to produce ethanol could take the price of said staple food out of the range for millions of the world's poorest. The authors continue:

The world's poorest people already spend 50 to 80 percent of their total household income on food. For the many among them who are landless laborers or rural subsistence farmers, large increases in the prices of staple foods will mean malnutrition and hunger. Some of them will tumble over the edge of subsistence into outright starvation, and many more will die from a multitude of hunger-related diseases.