An outstanding example of the banality of evil

The Guardian is reporting that a secret World Bank report attributes 75% of the recent rise in food prices to the push for biofuels in the US and EU (via). The use of sugar-cane based ethanol in Brazil was exonerated as a factor, however. The report contradicts the Bush administration claim that biofuels are responsible for less than 3% of the rise in food prices. The Guardian further claims that the World Bank has suppressed the report to avoid embarrassing the Bush administration.

Rising food prices have pushed 100,000,000 people below the global poverty line, leading one UN expert to call the push for biofuels a "crime against humanity". If that's true, it is an outstanding example of the banality of evil. The worst crimes in the world today? Genocide in Darfur, Torture in Gitmo, and politicians wooing Iowa voters with ethanol subsidies. It's like finding out that kissing babies at campaign stops gives the tots cancer.

Transgenic corn wandering into the food supply

Andrew Leonard has a post up arguing that the real problem with corn based ethanol is that it will create a market for all sorts of new varieties of transgenic corn. These transgenes will obviously wander into the food supply, because it turns out that gene flow is very hard to manage.

As an argument against corn ethanol, this is pretty weak. The market for transgenics is already so big it is only limited by the producers' ability to get new breeds to market. On the other hand, Leonard's article is a nice update on the world of transgenic corn, including an attempt by Monsanto to evade regulators for a new variety of high lysine corn for animal feed.