Washington Times Opinion: Let Them Eat Ethanol?

SEE ALSO: Complete Mona Charen Commentary

Washington DC April 28, 2008; The AIADA newsletter reported that food riots have rocked Egypt, Cameroon, Indonesia, Ethiopia and other nations. In Manila, police with M-16s have supervised the sale and distribution of subsidized grain. In Thailand and Pakistan, troops are guarding fields and warehouses. In Egypt, the army has been called out to bake bread. Even in the United States, a run on rice caused Sam's Club and Costco to limit how much consumers can purchase per visit.

The inflation in food prices worldwide — prices have soared 83 percent in the last three years — has a number of causes, writes Mona Charen in the Washington Times, is ethanol. We are now burning food as fuel, instead of eating it. All this, despite new data demonstrating that biofuels cost more energy than they save.

Not to mention, even if all of the world's industrial nations reduced their outputs of greenhouse gases by 20 percent as the Kyoto Protocol would have required by 2012, the reduction of global warming would have been 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit lower than otherwise, thus delaying global warming by a mere five years.