MALTHUS WEPT:

One quarter of US grain crops fed to cars - not people, new figures show (John Vidal, 1/22/10, guardian.co.uk)

"The grain grown to produce fuel in the US [in 2009] was enough to feed 330 million people for one year at average world consumption levels," said Lester Brown, the director of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington thinktank ithat conducted the analysis.

Last year 107m tonnes of grain, mostly corn, was grown by US farmers to be blended with petrol. This was nearly twice as much as in 2007, when Bush challenged farmers to increase production by 500% by 2017 to save cut oil imports and reduce carbon emissions.

We have so much excess food we burn it.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 22, 2010 11:20 AM