Missed Opportunities

Dear Reader,

The ethanol debate is not going away.

Politicians use the fuel issue to buy votes by pumping billions of dollars in taxpayer-financed subsidies into growing corn to make the stuff.

Farmers and related businesses love it because they make a decent living again.
Most damagingly of all, though, most people like ethanol because it gives them the illusion that we have found a solution to problems that go much deeper: agriculture, food, greenhouse gases and transportation.

I am not going to rehash all the scientific evidence that has meanwhile piled up over why ethanol from corn wreaks havoc way beyond greenhouse gas emissions.
Ethanol hurts the environment.

Ethanol also hurts our farmers. It hurts our farmers because it keps them in a state of semi-slavery dependent on political subsidies and commodities traders.

Those farmers don't produce food anymore - they produce a raw material for the automobile industry.

If we really wanted to help them survive as (real) farmers, then we should encourage them to get out of the commodities and subsidies-chasing business and start growing real food for real people again.

Over the decades, the agro-industrial complex, with the help of highly paid lobbyists and the complicity of the simpletons in Congress, has turned the once proud American farmer into a supplier of raw materials for the processed foods industry - like millions of dirt-poor coffee- or cocoa-bean-farmers in the developing world.

Thousands of energetic and dynamic farmers are showing that there is another way. We profile many of them in this newspaper and thousands of you see them every week at farmers' markets across the state or are members in their CSAs.

They grow real food - not fattening agents for the masses or fuel for SUVs.
Besides missing an opportunity to give a new direction to farming, we are also missing an opportunity to rethink our transportation priorities.

High gas prices could be great incentive to create public transportation systems across the nation that actually work for most people.

It could also provide our urban, suburban and sub-suburban planners with the impetus to stop bowing to the demands of the automobile and help create communities that are focused on the needs of people.

Walking and bicycling would not only help the environment, reduce stress levels and diminish noise pollution, it would also have very beneficial effects on our health - with all the impact that could have on health care costs.

But no, instead of using this splendid occasion and putting resources into sustainable transportation alternatives, we put our efforts into another silver bullet, a quick fix.

Of course it never works out that way because nobody sees the big picture. Our political solutions are inevitably dictated by lobbyists - who pay and get paid to obscure that big picture.