PASSIONATE RATIONS

The price of hops is going up. That means your beer will cost more.

As we sat down for beer, our group of three began discussing the world’s current socio-agro-environmental crises and we ended up focusing not on hops, but on corn.

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that corn prices have recently gone through the roof, inflating the specter of starvation in the Third World and raising real questions about our environmental fate.

This is what Rolling Stone magazine had to say about this issue a year ago:

“Ethanol doesn’t burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption — yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.

“So why bother? Because the whole point of corn ethanol is not to solve America’s energy crisis, but to generate one of the great political boondoggles of our time. Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 — twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners. And a study by the International Institute for Sustainable Development found that ethanol subsidies amount to as much as $1.38 per gallon — about half of ethanol’s wholesale market price.”

Somebody’s making money off this. And it ain’t the so-called Third World. Or me.

We’re all going to pay in the end.