Unintended Consequences – Corn & the Zone of Death

A few years ago, corn was the poster child for sustainable energy; now it makes headlines that sound like lousy movies. The basic argument said that filling our cars and trucks with corn-based ethanol would reduce our dependence on foreign oil by providing a domestic source of renewable energy. But new technologies often have unintended consequences. (Picture with insightful article from Greener Magazine blog.)

The first consequence was higher food prices. As the demand for corn has risen more than supply, its price has necessarily increased as well. This has pushed up the cost of food around the world, further eroding the ability of poor families to consume sufficient nutrition. It now appears that other plants such as switchgrass and sugar cane are preferable for ethanol production because they require less energy to be converted into biofuel and because they are not food staples like corn. Obviously, sugar is edible; it is just not consumed at the same level as corn.

The price of other foods has also been affected by the increase in demand for corn. Farm land previously used for growing a wide variety of crops has been increasingly used to grow corn. Given a constant demand for wheat, soybeans and other crops and a diminishing supply from farmers as they’ve switched to growing corn, these prices have had to rise—supply and demand.

Recently, a second unintended consequence has been in the news—a dead zone currently covering 7,900 square mile of the Gulf of Mexico. You may be familiar with this problem, but I hadn’t heard of it until I wrote an informal paper on organic farming last year. Dead zones are areas where oxygen levels are too low to support aquatic life. While four periods of low oxygen levels have been discovered at the mouth of the Mississippi before the invention of modern farming methods, the size of the Gulf’s dead zone has been increasing with the ever larger amounts of nitrogen runoff from American agri-business.

Why does growing corn exacerbate the problem? “Corn is more ‘leaky’ than crops such as soybean and alfalfa — that is, it absorbs less nitrogen per acre. The prime reasons are the drainage systems used in corn fields and the timing of when the fertilizer is applied” (Corn boom could expand ‘dead zone’ in Gulf, MSNBC.com, 17 Dec ’07).

So what can we do? First, we should advocate for non-food sources for ethanol production. Second, we can buy organic produce. Organic farming methods have been shown to result in less nitrogen runoff. Organic food may appear more expensive in the grocery store, but that is simply because we do not immediately see the costs associated with modern farming—depleted top soil, diminished fishing industry, etc. Third, we can find ways to reduce our driving. The less we drive, the less fuel we use. Producing and burning fuel will always have some environmental impact, so a change in lifestyle is ultimately more important than a change at the pump.

By: Jeff Boyd
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ADDITIONAL READING

• Cheap no more (The Economist, 6 Dec ’07)
• Corn ethanol, super fuel or hype (Greener Magazine, 20 July ’06)
• Crops & Gardening – Organic Farming (Hobby Farms, Jan/Fed ’07)
• Ethanol and food price volatility (Econbrowser, 22 July ’07)
• Ethanol demand threatens food prices (Technology Review, 13 Feb ’07)
• Ethanol fuel from corn faulted as ‘Unsustainable Subsidized Food Burning’ (Health and Energy)
• Facility to make ethanol from sweet sorghum (Energy Answers blog, 15 Dec ’07)
• Frog deformities linked to farm pollution (New Scientist, 25 Sep ’07)
• Hidden costs of corn-based ethanol (Christian Science Monitor, 21 May ’07)
• Study: Organic farming more efficient (Live Science, 18 July ’07)
• The rising tide of corn (Washington Post, 15 June ’07)

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