There was recently an interview at nature with Nina Fedoroff where she made some serious claims which I believe should receive some scrutiny. Those claims were all in an answer to the question: “What’s your stance on maize ethanol?”… What follows is my two cents on her two dollars.

First she reminded the widely heard-of idea that “People need to understand that if you grow maize for ethanol, you drive up the price of the maize. Brazil turns sugar into ethanol and it drives up the price of sugar. Now the World Food Programme can buy less and feed fewer people.”

Following, in the same answer she says that “Ethanol from maize is not going to solve the world’s energy problems, it is going to exacerbate them. And ethanol combustion produces the same carbon dioxide emissions as gasoline.”

Finally, she makes a very serious claim, which I’m actually not quite sure I get it. She says: “Besides, think about the millions of years of photosynthesis that are deposited in oil that we burned through in 100 years. You can’t recreate that process from an annual photosynthetic harvest.”

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First I would like to comment on that second quote. It’s quite superficial to go on saying that ethanol produces the same CO2 emissions as gasoline. First of all because, if I’m not mistaken, burning gasoline actually emits less CO2 per Joule (energy unit) then ethanol. Ethanol is also too volatile, it’s certainly not the fuel of dreams of any engineer. All those characteristics are mentioned in another article recently published at Nature, about the possibility of producing (in a viable way) a nice fuel called DMF from fructose and perhaps glucose, saccharose and starch.

The benefit of ethanol is that the production takes CO2 from the atmosphere. We want to recycle the CO2. It’s not good because it would emit less CO2, but because its production and consumption is a “carbon neutral” process. Or at least we would like it to be.

Burning gasoline is basically picking up a bag full of dust form your house basement, and blowing it in the middle of your living room. Using ethanol is just like doing that, but instead of picking the bag from the basement, you use a solar-powered vacuum cleaner.

It is very important to understand this. Some people are preaching the development of cars using hydrogen as fuel because it would have “zero emissions”. They are even thinking about making F1 cars with it. The same argument is used sometimes to defend electric cars. But that is pure marketing, it’s shallow and sneaky rhetoric. The H2 needs to be produced somewhere, as does the electric energy!… The good news would not be just to use H2 in cars, but to do that and to produce the H2 in a nice renewable way. It would hardly be a “clean” way, because we almost always have some kind of CO2 emission, but if we take it back from the atmosphere, it’s OK. It’s making the dirt and then cleaning it back.

Of course there are many other emitted molecules and variables to take into account, but let’s restrict our attention to CO2. Another question, for example, is that it would also be nice to take CO2 emissions out of the cities, but that’s also a higher-order question.

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In the first quote I highlighted up there, miss Fedoroff mentions the compromise between energy and food production. Well, this is obviously not that simple. I’m scared she talked like that, because the people who criticize Brazil’s production of ethanol are often interested in defending competitors, like oil producer. Is she really concerned only with the food?

Let’s talk food then. First of all, sugar was quite rare until the 15th or 16th centuries. It’s always very funny to think that today it could be so critical to the survival of humankind. It only became truly available in Europe after its introduction in Brazil and the rest of South America. The story of sugar is similar to that of the potato, this starch-drenched tuber. Portuguese and Spanish brought it from South America, and suddenly nobody could live without it. Same with maize. If it were not for the possibility of planting potatoes and maize in Europe and the USA, and the production of sugar from beet invented in the early 19 century, where would the world be right now?

…What I want to know is: exactly how much important is sugar (and maize) to humankind’s nourishment in general, and specifically to the survival of the more needy populations in the world? She talked about the World Food Programme, but how much sugar are they buying right now?

And is sugar that good? Is it right for the WFP to rely that much on sugar? We always read about sugar not being too well for your health. Some even go as far as saying it’s a drug!… I often hear that eating fruits are much better then sweet pastry, for example. Why does the WFP need sugar? Why not mangos, avocados and pineapples?… Is it just because it’s much harder to transport? (Hold this, we will be back to this issue shortly)

Now, on the other hand I’ve also heard that this campaign against sugar is something promoted by the American and European chemical sweetener companies and the USA government to reduce that nation’s dependency on foreign sugar cane… Is sugar the next oil? Is Brazil the next Iraq?? I hope not… At least the soft-drink companies managed to reduce their dependency on sugar, using maize sweetener instead… Tough it seems Coca-Cola’s dependency on foreign coca leaves remains, as does the addiction of a part of this rich population on the purified version of the coca’s active principle. One more product originated in South America’s biodiversity that the world can’t live without.

Now, concerning not just the need for sugar, but the compromise between the food and the fuel. (Or should we say the “compro-maize”?). Miss Fedoroff says as if the production of ethanol was something like choosing between picking up a bunch of carbon and either producing graphite to make pencils for children to write at school, or making diamonds for those expensive engagement rings that rich people can’t live without them.

It’s not like that!… Fuels are important! Energy is important!… Of course it’s not as important as food (tough you can drink alcohol), but it can be crucial.

Think about the WFP. (I told you not to forget that issue!…) They need energy to take the food where it’s needed. Suppose the WFP owns some sugar cane farms. At the end of the harvest they can chose how much of the cane will go for food, and how much will go for producing alcohol (that if their planes were based on ethanol, but anyway). If they used all the cane to make sugar, there would not be energy left to take it where it is needed. Not even to produce more cane! No, some of it must be spared. On the other hand, if you use all the cane to make fuel there will be obviously no sugar left to take it to the remote areas where the people who need it live.

So, it’s not obvious that using cane (or maize, for that matter) for making fuel instead of food will increase hunger, or as she said: “exacerbate the world’s energy problems”. There is a compromise, and not simply a greedy decision to make more money. The general people decide how much sugar and fuel they need, and offer to pay more or less accordingly. It’s basic free market. The only reason someone would be against the possibility of this compromise is either if she (“person” is a feminine word in Portuguese, I’m note referring to her specifically…) was defending the interests of an ethanol competitor (oil producers, for example), or if she wanted to keep the price of sugar unfairly low so that the Brazilian, Indian and Chinese producers don’t win the money they are entitled for growing this product with its growing importance in the world.

Why should Brazil, India and China make cheap sugar for the rich countries to feed the poorer ones? We don’t want to continue being on the poor side, receiving donations. We want to be on the side that is generous and magnanimous and give food for free. We want to produce and live by our work. As everyone does. As every single person that is aided by the WFP wants. What does the USA want? For Brazil India and China to be miserable countries that depend on foreign help, or finally start walking with our own legs?

And you know what? It’s not just making fuel and reducing the supplies that increases the price. Increase on the demand also increases the price. The WFP can make a campaign for rich people to eat less sugar, so the price goes down and they can buy more… They would be able to buy even more, because the same rich people who finance them would have saved money. That if they don’t go on spending this money in other drugs, as alcohol made from grapes or barley.

And you know what too? Why doesn’t the WFP just go on and buy beet sugar instead of the cane sugar that got more expansive because of ethanol? You see? The market is much more complicated then Miss Fedoroff makes it sound.

And the famine problem is equally much more complicated. It’s been quite a long time since Amartya Sen told us that hunger is much more related to democracy and infra-structure then to actual food production, and it is well-known that the total food production in the world is larger then the needed to feed everybody, contradicting the fears of Thomas Malthus .

What must be questioned is not the decision of the cane and maize producers in making more sugar or more ethanol. If the WFP decides they want more sugar, and come with the money, the Brazilian sugar producers will grin from ear to ear, and make sugar to stop the famine. If the WFP decides they have enough beet sugar, and need alcohol, then just give us the money, and there it is. It’s free market. You can’t ask the sugar and alcohol producers to make charity!… They might even decide to, as Chavez does sometimes giving oil away, but it’s a business first and foremost. Why doesn’t Fedoroff requires the flour and rice producers to give away food too?

So, what we need is first of all to have a nice free market going on. This doesn’t mean an uncontrolled market: we need to make sure that it is actually “free”, that we don’t have monopoly, oligopoly, trusts, cartels et cetera. We must have a true competition going on. This is actually a problem here in Brazil today, and this is what should be fought, not the ability of the producers to chose the destiny of their products.

We also need to make it clear who is paying for feeding the poor people, and not blame the food producers for not wanting to give away food. That is very naïve.

You can’t over-regulate the sugar and ethanol production just to make a beautiful policy, pretending that you are really solving the famine problem. The moment you create restrictions like “if you want to produce sugar you need to donate x% to the poor”, or “you can’t use more then y% of you cane to make fuel”, you are at risk to make the producers just go on work with soy, or whatever. It’s a free country, you know.

The restrictions actually exist. They should exist, and they should be openly debated. And they should have been mentioned by Fedoroff, who gave me the impression she either doesn’t know the subject well enough, or is making shallow and bombastic statements because she is defending a hidden dark and sinister agenda I don’t fully understand. Hope it’s not the case.

What I would like to see is the USA and Europe giving away some money for EMBRAER to make an ethanol-based plane to be fueled with Brazilian ethanol to fly to the famine areas and distribute nice fruits also grown in Brazil, in a viable way. That would be beautiful. Even more beautiful would be if we could also send the necessary equipament to let this people start producing their own food again, and stop having to rely on UN support, let’s never forget that.

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Now, what really gave me the creeps was the third quote. She makes it sound like it’s impossible to imagine that the world’s energy could ever stop relying on oil. The way she says it sounds even as if our current consumption was even larger then the total power available from the sunlight that hits the surface of the earth continuously! This is actually a possibility: the oil is a storage of energy formed a long time ago, and we might have been using it so fast that it could be the case that even if we cover our whole planet with sugar cane this production would not be enough to substitute the gasoline, just as the energy from other renewable sources such as photo-voltaic cells and hydroelectric plants wouldn’t do it.

In other words, there is a power limit for the so-called “renewable” sources, and that is the amount of solar radiation that hits the surface of the Earth. Does she really believe our consumption of oil energy has passed beyond that limit? That would be something very scary!!… I really don’t think so, and I suspect she doesn’t know what she was saying.

I believe she is either fighting in a very unfair way to reduce the price of food, in a very naïve attempt to reduce the world famine, or she is fighting in the name of the oil companies. Or else she just doesn’t know what she is talking about. Or it’s me, I am dumb, and I don’t totally doubt it. Which is it??…