As food prices skyrocket around the world, leading to shortages and riots in Egypt, Haiti and Uzbekistan, world agencies are urging increased funding and food aid from developed nations to help ease the problem.

Here’s the irony: If it weren’t for so-called biofuels, the current crisis wouldn’t exist. According to several experts in fuel technology, including researches at Cornell, most biofuels require more fossil fuels to create them than the fuel they produce. Basically, you would burn less fuel by just filling your tank with traditional gas than you would by using these “green” fuels. Perhaps the worst offender on a grand scale is corn, not because it is the least productive (it requires 29 percent more fossil energy than it ultimately produces), but because of its checkered history in the industrial food revolution.

Corn, a genetic freak of nature, is incredibly robust and versatile. Its exponential growth as a primary American crop is due in part to this versatility, but also to government subsidies that make it almost impossible for a farmer not to grow corn. And we have found ways to cram it into every mouth, human and animal, on the planet. Livestock meant to live on grasses are fed a diet of corn sludge and other foodstuffs not naturally part of their diets. Massive doses of antibiotics are meant to counteract the effects of such a diet. And then there’s high fructose corn syrup — man’s greatest corn achievement — which was developed as a way to utilize all this excess corn by creating a sweeter-than-sweet substance that found its way into almost every heavily processed food product Americans buy. Thanks to HFCS, people receive far more than their RDA of sugar and calories, and its contribution to increasing obesity cannot be underestimated. (Source: The Omnivore’s Dilemma, natch)

And shifting back to the current food crisis and the looming threat of increased worldwide hunger, I want to emphasize that it is possible for the epidemic of obsesity and the scourge of starvation to coexist. The calories people are ingesting, the ones that are making them unhealthily fat, are not nutritious ones. They are empty, sugary, fatty calories. Meaning, people may be getting plump, but they are deriving very little nutritional value from the calories coming their way. Many of these calories are delivered in some form of high fructose corn syrup, found in everything from coke and cereal to energy bars and whole-grain breads.

So. We have corn, (over)produced and subsidized and squeezed into every corner of the modern human experience. But thanks to a frighteningly effective PR campaign, most people believe that turning corn into ethanol is somehow “greener” than running a car on gas, when it takes more oil to turn the corn into ethanol than it does to run a car. In simple mathematical terms, it makes no sense. Then why would it be popular? Well that’s easy: oil companies are still profiting by selling their product to ethanol producers (perhaps even more of their product, since it requires more), and corn processors (not the growers — they don’t really reap the benefits of corn the way companies like Cargill and ADM, who buy the corn from them and then process/sell it, do) have found yet another use for their glut of corn. And this use has the social cache of saving the world from the threat of fossil-fueled ecological collapse. The industries responsible for this product have effectively convinced the public that it is “us” (humans and corn) versus “them” (oil), and that our side is right. But in reality, it’s just a different path with the same sad result.

And now, as we’re on the verge of crisis, with the threat of good nutrition becoming a luxury, we have one major factor to blame: biofuel in the form of corn-based ethanol. In a recent New York Times article, biofuels were cited by the World Bank as “one of the main factors behind the surge in prices. … Almost all of the rise in global corn production from 2004 to 2007 went to biofuels in the United States.” Other issues included droughts and climate change, which may not be mutually exclusive, and which again are part of the growing ecological crisis brought on by nothing short of an abuse of the planet’s non-renewable resources, the biggest of which are fossil fuels. Two other points here: 1) Higher demand for corn makes all of its derivatives more expensive, and when HFCS costs more, so do every one of the thousands of products it goes in; 2) Rising fuel prices also make it more expensive to ship foods, which is the case for something like 85% of what you find in the grocery store. So oil companies are getting it from all sides, and consumers are taking it from both ends.

I think NPR’s Steve Inskeep (love him) said it best when, during an interview with World Bank President Robert Zoellick about the food crisis report, he said, “We wouldn’t be talking about this if it weren’t for biofuels.” To which Zoellick responded, “I think I answered your question.”

But there’s a larger issue here. Even larger than sweeping crops of corn and drilling in ANWAR and shadowy corporations driving us deeper into ecological debt. It’s population, and the stark fact that this planet was never meant to accommodate as many humans as it now does. I’m not saying China’s one-child policy is the way to go, nor am I a Gaia believer. But this statement is actually based on science and not opinion.  

At the turn of the 20th century, as industry and population continued to explode, scientists and agronomists quickly realized that the planet could not sustain continued growth. At some point, the population would simply stop short. But then, something happened that changed the course of human history. And it was something molecular:

“When humankind acquired the power to fix nitrogen, the basis of soil fertility shifted from a total reliance on the energy of the sun to a new reliance on fossil fuel.” Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) is referring here to the Haber-Bosch process of creating more nitrogen, enabling more fertilizer and an explosion in the human population (from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000). The method was soon perfected, and has been called the most important invention of the 20th century. Without it, most of us simply would not exist.

The process combines nitrogen and hydrogen gases under heat and pressure, both of which require electricity. And the hydrogen comes from a fossil fuel.  Which basically means, we have made feeding plants more like powering cars. Fertilizer requires this manufactured nitrogen, which requires fossil fuels to be processed. This process of manufactured fertilizer removed reliance on a natural, “local, sun-driven cycle of fertility.” And this may prove to be a monkey’s paw, in more ways than one. Now we are a population of parasites on earth, depending on non-renewable fossil fuels not only for our transport, but also for the very food we need to survive. And as that becomes more of a luxury commodity, the strain of such overpopulation is finally felt. With a vengeance.

It’s all connected. And that’s why when one thing collapses, everything collapses.

Meanwhile in the sexy world of fertilizer, some companies have decided to test what they charmingly refer to as “biosolids” (basically human excrement and some other equally unsavory dumping materials) as a solution to lead-based paints. These biosolids (less charmingly referred to by those outside the industry as sludge) are mixed with fertilizer and spread in the backyards and schoolyards of where? You guessed it: low-income neighborhoods. Scientists told families and concerned locals in one St. Louis neighborhood that the danger of high lead levels in their soil would be mitigated by the sludge if ingested. Basically, phosphate and iron in the sludge would bind to lead and other hazardous metals in the soil, allowing them to pass safely through a child’s body.

First of all, how many of these kids are sitting there eating dirt? I dunno. Secondly, these people were not told about possible ill effects of exposure to the sludge (which, by the way, is spread on cropsoil all over the country without debate). And thirdly, WTF? You’re testing in poor neighborhoods — why? Because these are the people least likely to fight such measures when told they are getting nice, new lawns for free.

People involved in this research acted like they were doing the test subjects favor: “What we did was make the yards greener,” said Johns Hopkins University Community Relations Coordinator  Pat Tracey. This despite the fact that there are “low levels of toxic substances” in the sludge, and no scientific proof that all harmful material is actually being removed from the biosolids before they’re spread. Basically, let’s solve lead-poisoning by dumping a bunch of sh*t we can’t seem to get rid of on top of it. Let’s let those poor kids eat sh*t. I doubt any of these researchers would have approved such an experiment in their own backyards.

According to HUD documents, the study’s lead author, Mark Farfel, has been involved in several other lead contamination studies, some of which have been controversial, to put it mildly. In 2001, Maryland’s appeals court compared his EPA-funded reseach on low-cost ways to control lead hazards to “Nazi medical research on concentration camp prisoners, the U.S. government’s 40-year Tuskegee study that denied treatment for syphilis to black men in order to study the illness and Japan’s use of ‘plague bombs’ in World War II to infect and study entire villages.” The testing basically exposed more than 75 poor children to lead-based paint in partially renovated houses. The institute later settled with two families after they suffered elevated blood-lead levels and brain damage.

And now, Farfel directs the World Trade Center Health Registry, which monitors the ongoing health of 9/11 survivors. I’m sure he’s applying the same ethical and humane practices to them that he used on poor, urban minorities. I would also like to note that the first time I read this story was two days ago, and almost EVERY article related to it seems to have disappeared from search results overnight. Odd.

But I’m not bitter. Not completely. There are things that can be done. But if you don’t want to join Amnesty International or donate your life savings to Oxfam, then you could just play Free Rice, which lets you bone up on your vocab while simultaneously donating rice to hungry children around the world. Now there’s a computer game actually worth playing!