Articles by Grist staff

Tufts study: Corn subsidies are a sop to HFCS industry, but don't alone make bad food cheap

I have a complex and much criticized view of farm subsidies. 

On the one hand, I acknowledge that the "commodity program" embedded in the Farm Bill is a back-door sop to agribusiness giants like meat titan Tyson and grain-processor Archer Daniels Midland. By encouraging farmers to produce as much corn and soy as possible even when prices are low, subsidies push down the price of commodity crops -- and fatten the profits of the firms that buy them.

On the other hand, I disagree with sustainable-food activists who claim that subsidies are the root of our food-system problems. Take them away, I've argued more than once, and you'd still have a food system that mainly produces junk churned out by a few big companies. Plus, rather than campaigning to end subsidies, I think we should be pushing to redirect them to more useful purposes: like rebuilding local and regional food infrastructure.

A study just released by the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts illustrates my point. The authors -- veteran Tufts researcher Tim Wise, plus Alicia Harvie -- look at the effect corn subsidies have had on consumption of high-fructose corn syrup, the U.S. food industry's favorite sweetener.

They essentially pose two questions: 1) Do HFCS producers benefit from the subsidy program?; and 2) Can the rise in obesity/overweight and diabetes rates be tied to corn subsidies through HFCS?  Their conclusions might surprise you.

The economic-recovery bill includes green funding and drops nuclear and coal subsidies

The $789 billion economic-recovery bill looks good in terms of green spending, according to preliminary analysis from the Center for American Progress. The House and Senate reached agreement on the bill on Wednesday and are expected to approve it by the end of the week; President Obama hopes to sign it into law by Presidents’ […]

A floating city takes shape in NYC

Take a good look at your plot of dry land now, folks, because according to the latest projection, the oceans could rise up to 21 feet in some places. Already, island nations being sipped up by the sea are investing in water-hugging houses (or land suitable for relocation), and flood-prone places like the Netherlands have […]

Is the U.S. ready for sane ethanol policy?

Imagine you're a policy maker with the power to commit federal cash and rules to a strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and fossil-fuel use.

You'd want to build in mechanisms to make sure your policies are working toward your goals and not having all sorts of negative unintended consequences ... right? 

Well, that's what a coalition of green NGOs -- Environmental Working Group, Friends of the Earth, Network for New Energy Choices, the Clean Air Task Force, and New York Public Interest Research Group -- are calling for with regard to the nation's biofuel policy.

They charge that  the U.S. biofuel program actually "exacerbates global warming" because of greenhouse gas emissions from nitrogen fertilizers and the conversion of grasslands and rainforest to cropland. Further, the mass production of monocropped fuel feedstocks like corn, soy, and palm degrades soils, increases water pollution, drives out biodiversity, and endangers the food security of vulnerable populations. In the process of creating these lamentable side effects, biofuels are offsetting a relatively small amount of conventional fuel use -- and are grabbing the lion's share of federal support for alternative energy. In short, biofuels have been an abject failure.

Whether or not you agree with their analysis, it's hard to see how any sane person could object to their policy proposals, which I've pasted below the fold. Their suggestions amount to safeguards to ensure that federal biofuel policies actually reduce greenhouse gas and don't contribute to a food crisis.

Under the previous regime, such standards seemed too high. Few assumed that President Bush promoted biofuels because he thought they might reduce gas consumption (never much of a priority) or mitigate climate change (which he never took seriously).

After all, as Dennis Keeney, emeritus professor of agronomy at Iowa State, recently wrote, "money, not science, has driven ethanol fuel policy." Keeney's assessment applies to U.S. biofuel policy since its inception under Jimmy Carter.

Will Obama do better? Last I checked, the only biofuel-related tweak the new administration was considering involved trying to get more etahnol into the fuel supply. But if the president does want to align biofuel policy with his environmental and social goals, he should heed the policy proposals cobbled together by the Environmental Working Group and its peers, pasted below.