Biofuels have fused the food and fuel markets, raising prices and adding to climate change

The boom in biofuels, largely ethanol made from corn, "has linked food and fuel prices just as oil is rising to new records, pulling up the price of anything that can be poured into a gasoline tank," Steven Mufson of The Washington Post in yesterday's installment of the paper's series on the global food crisis. "The price of grain is now directly tied to the price of oil," Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute, a Washington research group, told the Post. "We used to have a grain economy and a fuel economy. But now they're beginning to fuse."

Even as policymakers begin to voice reservations about recent measure to spur more biofuel production, Mufson reports, "Two leading oil pipeline companies are exploring the feasibility of building a $3 billion ethanol pipeline, the first of its kind, to link Iowa and other parts of the Midwest with motor-fuel markets in the East. It would carry 3.65 billion gallons a year and give another industry a vested interest in maintaining high ethanol output."

American farmers' rush to corn last year "edged out some soybeans, which as a result are being grown in greater numbers on previously unplowed areas in other countries," Mufson writes. "And that releases carbon dioxide that had previously been stored in the soil as organic matter," adding to the atmosphere the main greenhouse gas responsible for climate change.

Mufson's story, which focuses on Iowa and has some interesting details about eggs and castrated roosters, is an evenhanded glimpse of a few slices of perhaps the greatest problem facing the world today. But it and the Post series prompted objections from farm and biofuel interests, reflected in this story by Peter Shinn of Brownfield Network.