How We Can Shed Pork By Cutting Out Corn

With the swelling federal deficit getting harder and harder to ignore, politicians of all stripes like to wax poetic about cutting the lard. They may want to sit down with environmental groups, who have their budget hawk hats on and are lighting up a big neon blinking arrow "LOOK HERE."

Corn may not be a fatty food. Nor does it share a section of the food pyramid with pork.

But our government's subsidies for corn-based ethanol—to the tune of $6 billion dollars a year—is wasteful and even harmful spending at its finest, as I detailed in a previous post.

The arguments boil down to this: A) The 45-cent-per-gallon tax credit is totally unnecessary since we already have an ethanol mandate and because the industry is already "mature." B) Corn-ethanol creates far too much air, water and climate pollution to justify a subsidy in the name of environmental protection. and C) The money suffocates better alternatives to biofuel made from corn: Sugarcane ethanol, mostly made in Brazil, has a much smaller carbon footprint, and in the U.S., the promising advanced biofuel industry is struggling to find its legs and could actually use the help.

The time for Big Corn's day of reckoning may finally have come. There is less than two weeks left in this year's Congressional calendar, and all Congress has to do is simply let the subsidies and tariff expire, as they are scheduled to do when 2010 winds down.

The calls to let this happen are growing louder and are coming from all corners. Just two examples:

-- Environmentalists are united in their desire to see the subsidies sunset. In a cool stunt, activists with Friends of the Earth recently showed up at Washington press conference with Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack dressed as "Billionaires for Biofuels" to mock the corn industry's desire for government handouts.

-- Kenneth Green of the conservative American Enterprise Institute recently wrote, "Contrary to popular belief, ethanol fuel does little or nothing to increase our energy security or stabilize fuel prices...Instead, it will increase greenhouse gas emissions, local air pollutant emissions, fresh water scarcity, water pollution (both riparian and oceanic), land and ecosystem consumption, and food prices."

When Friends of the Earth and the American Enterprise Institute agree—you know there is strong support.

The powerful Big Corn lobby doesn't want its handouts to go away, of course, and is gearing up for a last minute appeal.

But there's another industry that is mounting an opposition. Brazilian sugar cane producers, represented by the trade group Sweeter Alternative, are making a more efficient, environmentally-friendly biofuel. They are calling for a simultaneous expiration of both the ethanol tax credit and import tariff they face. The last thing our nation should be doing is standing in the way of free trade that is a net benefit to the planet, especially when we are spending billions of dollars importing foreign oil from countries such as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia anyway.

If you agree that Congress should end its Big Corn handouts, you should sign Sweeter Alternative's petition here.

Photo credit: Perry McKenna via Flickr

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