Repeal ethanol mandates to ease global food shortage

The only benefit that may come from the widespread flooding in the nation's Midwestern grain belt is that it could provide political cover for washing away the federal government's destructive ethanol mandates.

As much as 4.4 percent of this year's corn crop, or 3.3 million acres, is expected to be lost to the floods covering the central farm states.

Even before the heavy rains, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was predicting food prices would rise 5 percent in 2008.

That increase is due in part to the federal energy bill signed into law last fall requiring the production of 9 billion gallons of biofuels this year, up from 6.4 billion in the 2007 law. The mandate will be met largely by producing ethanol from corn.

Continuing to convert corn to ethanol will push up global food prices by 10 to 15 percent, according to a United Nations estimate, and add to the hunger and starvation in the poorest parts of the world

A fifth of the nation's corn crop now goes to make ethanol.

The ethanol mandates have been exposed as a bankrupt policy. Not only have they put the fuel industry in competition with food producers for the corn crop, they've shifted acreage into corn cultivation that previously was used for other crops, including soybeans and wheat. That's led to additional price pressure on everything from milk to meat.

In April, an advisory panel to the European Environment Agency urged the European Union to suspend its 10 percent ethanol mandate in response to the global food shortage.

Congress won't back off the mandates without a fight.

The farm lobby loves the steady market the ethanol requirement creates and the higher prices.

But the federal requirements are doing too much damage to ignore.

There's some hope that future ethanol will be made from switch grass and wood chips, but it will be a long time before cellulose ethanol can be produced in the quantity necessary to satisfy the mandates.

Congress should repeal the mandates and allow the true market to establish ethanol production levels.

And it should use the ethanol experience to inform it yet again of the danger of trying to use government mandates to create markets.

Even with evidence of the harm caused by the ethanol mandates, Congress is deep into consideration of other alternative energy mandates that also would drive up costs for consumers.

American families are getting hit hard by the spike in food and gasoline prices. They don't need their electric and home heating bills to soar as well. Congress can't do anything about the flooding. Nor can it counter the rising demand for meat and grains from rapidly developing countries such as China and India.

But it can undo its contribution to the food shortage.

The flooding in the Midwest gives Congress a defensible reason to repeal its ethanol mandate in the name of providing price relief for American consumers and much-needed food for the world's hungry.

Reprinted from The Detroit News.