March 8 Newsletter

U.S. coffee drinkers, I found some free coffee for you. Mother's Organic Coffee will give you a free sample of Mother Earth News Organic Coffee, as well as a 30% off coupon on your next purchase.
Also in the U.S.: I recently ordered Organic Fair Trade Mexico Altura Tollan and Organic Fair Trade Sumatra Gayo Mountain whole-bean coffee from CoffeeAM. I'm a dark -roast gal, not a coffee connoisseur but I know what I like, and I'm very happy with the Mexico coffee so far (haven't gotten to the Sumatra yet.) CoffeeAM has a good selection of organic fair trade coffee and usually has a free half-pound to throw into the bargain. Its current bonus offering is Irish Mocha Mint flavor.

Hickory Farms is offering 25% off, all the way through Tuesday, April 3. Just use the code SAVE25 when you check out.

Chocolate Source is doing its part with 10% off all orders of $10 or more, through March 31. Use coupon code 87632 for this one. They ship in the US and Canada.

For those of you in the UK, here's something a little different: Save the Bacon is running a children's Easter drawing contest. The winner gets a family outing to see your favorite film, not to mention the honor of having his or her drawing on the Save the Bacon home page over Easter. Send entries to doug@savethebacon.com by 30 March. For you grownups - maybe this is more your creative style - they're asking for your creative efforts in writing their new slogan. Write a slogan on why you like organic meat, send it to them (use their contact form on thier Web site) and you could win a voucher for £100. They're also offering 15-20% off Aberdeen Angus beef and free shipping.

Feature Article: Food or Fuel

Democrats and Republicans rarely agree here in the U.S., but they've found common ground in alternative fuels. President Bush first called for increased ethanol production to replace imported oil in his State of the Union address in January 2006, and made it more definite this year as he called for 35 billion gallons of renewable fuels per year by 2017 - a hefty increase over the estimated 4.9 billion gallons produced last year. He's not alone; Europe is requiring that that 5.75% of diesel fuel come from plants by 2010.

Why the interest? Two reasons. One, the security threat implicit in relying on the Middle East and other unpredictable sources for something so crucial as oil. Two, the environmental impact of replacing high-emission fossil fuels with cleaner-burning plant fuels.

The projected demand has made ethanol processing the capital investment du jour. In addition to the 116 ethanol plants in production, and the 79 under construction, at least 200 more ethanol plants, with a capacity of 3 billion gallons a year, are in the planning stages. That's just in the U.S. 90 biodiesel plants are under construction in Malaysia and Indonesia.

So what's the problem? In Southeast Asia, forests are being burned to clear land for oil palms. In Brazil, it's sugar cane. Does it really make sense to destroy ecologically valuable terrain to make better fuels? Is that a net gain?

In the U.S. and Canada, the chief raw material for biofuel is corn. According to a February 5 article in Business Week, "Food vs. Fuel," some 20% of the American corn crop in 2006 went to ethanol production. That's with just the 112 plants currently in production. If construction of new plants continues as planned, they will absorb as much as 50% of the country's corn harvest by 2008. That's corn that would otherwise go to feeding livestock or people, in the U.S. and outside it

Corn farmers are not only giddy over the high demand, but confident that they can meet the increasing need. As the market price for corn increases - and it certainly has, jumping from $1.86 per bushel at the end of 2005 to over $4 - farmers will be encouraged to shift production to corn and away from other crops.

That's well and good, but what happens to those other crops? Soybeans, barley, rice - the laws of supply and demand are just as efficient with those crops as with corn. Drop the supply with no reduction in demand, and the price goes up.

And it ripples. High-fructose corn syrup is a leading ingredient in everything from Pepsi to Power Bars. Even more dramatic, most of the livestock grown in the developed world is grain-fed. Some of their feed can be replaced by distiller's grain, a by-product generated from ethanol plants, but a grain-based diet still requires a certain amount of corn. Chicken producers estimate that the industry's feed costs are already up $1.5 billion per year.

A ready example of the effects in the developing world is in Mexico, where tortillas are both a dietary staple and a source of national identity. Poor Mexicans get more than 40 percent of their protein from tortillas, and a family of four will consume as much as a kilo (2.2 pounds) per day. In a nation where the daily minimum wage is less than $5, the price of tortillas has increased from 63 cents per kilo a year ago to between $1.36 and $1.81 in early January 2007. This has already led to civil unrest. As the U.S. and Canada divert their own production to fuel rather than food, the situation can only get worse.

What to do? Clearly alternative fuels are a worthwhile pursuit. But relying on corn may produce as many problems as it solves. What has this to do with us, you wonder? One thing I haven't seen mentioned in any of the articles I read was switching livestock feed from grain to grass. I'm not sure of the source, but one article I read stated that as much as 55% of the country's corn production went to factory-farmed hogs, chickens, and cattle. There is some evidence to suggest that feeding livestock grain, which their digestive tracts weren't made for, produces toxic bacteria (resulting in an increased need for antibiotics) and the dreaded E.coli, which caused the problems in humans in recent months. Seems that a grass-based diet might address a multitude of ills.