In the last debate of the presidential candidates on October 15th, John McCain said something truly profound for frustrated horse owners who have suffered at the leading edge of the economic downturn. Well before the housing and lending crisis, the 60 million Americans involved in some way with our most productive domestic animal partner - the horse - have felt the rising costs and intense agricultural and public lands competition caused by the Corn Ethanol Industry. John McCain vowed, as part of this Energy Plan, if elected, to put a stop to it. He will end the absurb subsidies for ethanol made from food that are decried by the most advanced environmentalists and killing our horses, slowly but surely.
How is this true? Let me explain for those who think the reason cattlemen are driving our wild horses off their ranges, and hay growers are charging in-state buyers $12 a bale for hay that cost $6 a couple of years ago, and shavings for bedding are scarce, and dairy farming publications advocate horse slaughter — it is primarily a basic economic battle for scarce resources and profits triggered by, and sustained by, the corn-for-ethanol debacle.
Farm Bill subsidies, production tax incentives, continued “research” grants, legal mandates to require biofuel additions to gasoline, and low-interest loans all continue to help the American agricultural biofuels industry be so successful that since 2004 it has been the largest producer of crop-based ethanol in the world. In 2004 the corn-based U.S. ethanol surpassed Brazil’s sugar cane-based ethanol production levels. Since the grain was not available to the animal agriculture industry to feed dairy cows, beef cattle, pigs and poultry, hay prices skyrocketed. Rice and soybean prices also rose sharply, because consumption all over the world increased, while acres under production, particularly in the world’s breadbasket, America, did not. Rice bran and soybeans, along with beet pulp, are the primary base ingredients in the Non-structural Carbohydrate horse feeds and senior horse feeds. Consequently, a 40# bag of senior horse feed went from an average retail price of $11.00 to $18.00, and an average retail price of a 40# bag of stabilized rice bran increased from $17.00 to $28.00 in the last 36 months.
WASHINGTON, July 28 (Reuters) - Large increases in biofuels production in the United States and Europe are the main reason behind the steep rise in global food prices, a top World Bank economist said in research published on Monday.
World Bank economist, Don Mitchell, concluded that biofuels and related low grain inventories, speculative activity, and food export bans pushed prices up by 70 percent to 75 percent. The remaining 25 percent to 30 percent was due to a weaker U.S. dollar, higher energy costs and related rises in fertilizer and transport costs, he wrote.
Yet, in the same month, July 2008, the Democrat Congress merrily passed the Farm Bill that costs each taxpaying household $5,046 per year, and makes it harder to feed our animals! [S. 2302 The Food and Energy Security Act of 2007, which 78% of the American public opposed, nevertheless was passed by the non-representative Senate OVER the president's VETO of the House original version, H.R. 2419, which cost $5,853 per American family that 69% of the public opposed.] This travesty doesn’t include H.R. 6124, The Food, Conservation and Energy Act, engineered by a non-representative House despite opposition by a whopping 96% of the public, that costs us another $600 BILLION. Read what the president had to say to Congress when vetoing this monster to subsidize farming http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/06/20080618-1.html . It also contained $807 MILLION in EARMARKS, including $250 million for a 400,000-acre land purchase from a private owner, and funding and authority for the noncompetitive sale of National Forest land to a ski resort.
“… the new farm bill reduces the blenders tax credit for corn ethanol from 51¢ to 45¢ per gallon and creates a $1.01-per-gallon cellulosic biofuel production tax credit. However, current policies are not so clear-cut in trying to minimize food and greenhouse gas impacts. For example, there is no indication that Congress is prepared to eliminate the blenders tax credit completely, once U.S. corn ethanol production reaches 15 billion gallons. And the new tax credit for cellulosic biofuels is awarded regardless of whether the cellulosic feedstock displaces food crops or not. [Emphasis mine.] Furthermore, current policy awards U.S. biodiesel made from virgin vegetable oils twice the subsidy given to previously used feedstocks.” - Bruce Babcock, Breaking the Link Between Food and BioFuels Briefing Paper 08-BP 53, Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, Iowa State University, July, 2008
The liberal left is to blame for the ethanol disaster, including the atrocious 2007 Farm Bill authored and passed by the Democrat Congress. http://www.openmarket.org/2008/04/18/the-left-on-ethanol/
NOTE: These subsidies DO NOT include the 10 cents per bushel premium that ethanol producers such as Cargill pay corn farmers to sell their crop directly to the ethanol plants rather than on the open market where it could be purchased for food. Major ethanol producer, Cargill explains how it influences legislation and diverts food to fuel http://www.agriculture.com/ag/story.jhtml;jsessionid=RI1ZFYDLPQ4EFQFIBQNSAOQ?storyid=/templatedata/ag/story/data/agNews_050701crCARGILLdl.xml
John McCain recognizes that there is no further need for the government to subsidize corn ethanol, especially when other bio-fuels, such as manure-based methane, and algae-based diesel, do not produce the greenhouse gasses corn ethanol does. John McCain also recognizes that it does NOT make sense to make fuel from food.
McCain Platform Excerpt:
John McCain Believes Alcohol-Based Fuels Hold Great Promise As Both An Alternative To Gasoline And As A Means of Expanding Consumers’ Choices. Some choices such as ethanol are on the market right now. The second generation of alcohol-based fuels like cellulosic ethanol, which won’t compete with food crops, are showing great potential.
- Today, Isolationist Tariffs And Wasteful Special Interest Subsidies Are Not Moving Us Toward An Energy Solution. We need to level the playing field and eliminate mandates, subsidies, tariffs and price supports that focus exclusively on corn-based ethanol and prevent the development of market-based solutions which would provide us with better options for our fuel needs.
Clearly, the pattern of weather, insect life cycles, bird migrations, and soil erosion that had battered farmers on the cost and yield side, and fluctuating market prices that had battered them on the sales side, had been mastered at last. The government paid them nice guaranteed, easy to predict profits to grow biofuels instead of food. No one blames the farmers for rejoicing, and the shareholders of the huge agribusinesses are certainly happy counting their dividends. Likewise, the Democrats swept into power in the 2004 election are enjoying their campaign contributions toward re-election, and the perks provided by the farm lobbyists. Most of the USDA bureaucrats grew up with, went to Ag College with, and married into the families of the farmers they serve. It is all one big happy family, isn’t it?
Cattle ranchers and the giant meat packers, who are increasingly the same companies, felt the squeeze trying to feed their millions of animals. So they began pushing “range-fed” beef to consumers who had jumped on the “organic” and “natural” and “environmentally friendly” bandwagon. Range fed certainly is more natural than grain fed in a feedlot. Forest Service Range Management Advisory Boards, made up exclusively of grazing leaseholders, formerly begrudgingly spared a few thousand acres and a stream, pond, or catchment trough for the wild horses to assuage the public. Thanks to the corn-to-ethanol scam, they could no longer afford to feel and act generously toward our heritage — our legally protected wild horses. More cattle had to graze, so the wild horses had to go. Enter, the Burns Amendment, which authorizes the BLM and USFS to sell our national treasures, the wild horses and burros, for slaughter more directly and aggressively than in the past. The sudden rise in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s of the number of horses being sent to slaughter by ranchers who bred horses as a sideline to beef production coincides with the corn-to-ethanol nightmare. [Source: USDA statistics over a ten year period. ]
The average number of horses slaughtered in the U.S. prior to 1998 was 50,000, with some years as low as 25,000 when Canadian horses were not shipped to Illinois plants. The 100,000 slaughtered the last year U.S. plants were open, and now shipped to Canada and Mexico, have more to do with the shifting land use for corn and cattle than anything else. Since the Burns Amendment, according to USDA and BLM figures, approximately 10,000 of those horses per year are our wild mustangs. The mustang population has dropped from a high of 65,000 to 25,000, with 37,000 moved to cattle ranchers’ land in Texas and Kansas for eventual slaughter as “unadoptable.” Thus, though this wildlife accounts for 1% of the American horse population, it equals nearly 10% of the horses sent to slaughter as “unwanted.” Yet, 80% of the American public wants these horses preserved and protected, free on their ranges, where eco-tourists can see them representing the Spirit of America and our history. Why is most of the BLM budget to care for wild horses on public lands being spent to warehouse them with ranchers and then sell them for European haute cuisine? Why isn’t the will of the people being served by its elected officials, their appointees, and salaried government public servants? The answer is obvious from this brief survey of the facts: Big Government attempting to manipulate sectors of present and future systems over which it has no productive, only an increasingly consumptive role, deluding itself that because it “means well” it is capable of doing good, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary in the past and present..
