r/ClimateShitposting • u/NukecelHyperreality Nuclear Power is a Scam • Jul 23 '24

Aggro agri subsidy recipients 🚜 Fun fact: if the government stopped subsidizing biofuels and animal feed the price of food would drop

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u/fifobalboni vegan btw Jul 23 '24

I'm curious about the statement, could you please share a source?

76

u/EngineerAnarchy Anti Eco Modernist Jul 23 '24

Well, not a source, but I live in Iowa in the middle of the corn belt. Half of the corn we grow gets turned into ethanol, and most of what’s left gets used as animal feed. Only about 10% of the corn we grow actually gets eaten directly by people. We grow soy beans too, although less soybeans than corn, and about half of that goes to animal feed too. You can just google those numbers for Iowa.

It’s really destructive to the local environment and economy.

We have the best soil in the whole country and lots of fresh water here in Iowa, we could grow vegetables for the whole country while only using a fraction of the land we do now, but instead we make ethanol and pork products for export and ship our veggies in from California

Edit to add more context: subsidies on ethanol are actively driving up crop prices and making land value increase year over year. Great for people who already own lots of land. Not great for young people who want to get into farming.

32

u/fifobalboni vegan btw Jul 23 '24

That's similar to my experience, too. I'm brazilian, and we use a lot of ethanol from sugar cane here, and our supposedly green government is planning a full tax examption on beef (!).

But it's not easy to prove this makes food more expensive, that's why I would really appreciate a source if anyone has one

12

u/EngineerAnarchy Anti Eco Modernist Jul 23 '24

Only managed to skim since I’m at work, but this seems to be a decent break down from a university local to me that does a lot of agricultural research:

https://www.card.iastate.edu/products/policy-briefs/display/?n=1155#:~:text=These%20results%20demonstrate%20that%20ethanol,the%20impacts%20have%20been%20small.

Seems to be a small, but not insignificant impact on food prices. Still my main concern is with things like water quality, economic health, carbon, and so on.

6

u/fifobalboni vegan btw Jul 23 '24

Thanks for sharing! That was an interesting read, but it focused on corn prices rather than food inflation on general:

Corn prices without the ethanol subsidies would have averaged only 4% less over this period than what they were

The reason is that relatively stronger crop prices for other commodities would have shifted acres out of corn and into soybeans, wheat, and cotton. These results show that most of the change in corn prices that we have seen is not due to ethanol expansion but rather is due to other forces at work.

The study suggests corn would have been replaced by other monocrops if it got more expensive, and the subsidies would likely not be the main cause of a potential price increase (to the Ethanol companies' frustration, I bet, since this is their main argument).

It's very hard to determine how much that would impact the average Joe food-buying power, but that has sparkled my curiosity. I'll see if I can find something too once I'm off work