The Guardian (guardian.co.uk)

On August 22, the American Corn Growers Association endorsed Barack Obama for the presidency. It was only the second time in the group’s 21-year history that it has endorsed a candidate for the White House. The corn growers said they like Obama because he supports agriculture and “the expansion of renewable energy such as advanced ethanol” and other renewable sources.

But don’t expect to see any prominent mentions of that endorsement on BarackObama.com. Nor should you expect to hear Obama use the word “ethanol” between now and election day. Indeed, over the past few months, as the reports on corn ethanol’s environmental and food price impacts have gone from bad to awful, Obama has been scurrying away from his record as one of the Senate’s most reliable corn ethanol boosters.

Over the past few weeks, the Obama campaign has refused to answer questions about Obama’s support for the federal ethanol mandates, and the candidate’s website has been purged of his old energy platform, which included several lines about his plans to increase ethanol production in the US.

But try as they might, neither Obama nor his running mate, Joe Biden, can shake the smell of corn alcohol. And that may provide an opening for Obama’s opponent, John McCain, who has long been one of the Senate’s loudest ethanol critics. McCain briefly switched sides on ethanol in the months prior to the Iowa caucuses. But he is now one of a dozen Republican senators who are pushing a bill would freeze the volume of corn ethanol to be blended into gasoline at no more than 9 billion gallons per year.

In 2006, Obama, along with four other farm-state senators, sent a letter to President Bush urging him to ignore calls to reduce the $0.54 per-gallon tariff on imports of Brazilian sugarcane-based ethanol. During his first year in office, Obama twice used corporate jets belonging to the Illinois-based agribusiness giant, Archer Daniels Midland Co, one of America’s biggest ethanol producers. In January 2007, Obama along with two other farm-state senators, Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, and Indiana Republican Richard Lugar, introduced a bill called the American Fuels Act of 2007, which was aimed at promoting ethanol consumption. Touting the bill, Obama said: “To become truly energy independent, we need not only to increase domestic production of renewable fuels like ethanol.”

Like Obama, Biden has long been a staunch ethanol booster. He has supported legislation aimed at requiring oil companies to retrofit their service stations with pumps capable of dispensing E85, a blend of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline, and legislation aimed at forcing automakers to produce cars capable of burning E85. Biden has declared that the US “should increase the amount of ethanol and biodiesel included in the nation’s fuel supply by extending and increasing” the federal mandates that require American refiners to add ethanol to their gasoline. (Under current federal rules, US oil refiners must be using at least 15bn gallons of ethanol per year in their gasoline by 2015. Nearly all of that will be made from corn.)

The huge increases in corn ethanol production are affecting food prices. At least 10 studies have found that US corn ethanol production is affecting prices at the supermarket. An April 8 internal report from the World Bank said that the price surge “was caused by a confluence of factors but the most important was the large increase in biofuels production in the US and EU.” In mid-July, Consumer Price Index data showed that over the previous three months, US food prices increased at an annualized rate if 8% – one of the biggest increases in recent history.

Clean air advocates contend that the increasing use of ethanol in gasoline is increasing the amount of smog in America’s cities. A spate of studies has shown that the production of corn ethanol likely creates more greenhouse gases than conventional gasoline.

For Obama, fighting corn ethanol would mean cutting subsidies to corn farmers in his home state. In 2006 alone, according to data from the Environmental Working Group, Illinois farmers received corn subsidies totalling $752.4m, making Illinois second only to Iowa in total federal corn handouts. And Illinois ranks third among the states in ethanol production capacity, behind only Iowa and Nebraska.

Taking “change” to Washington – the Obama campaign’s mantra – will require fighting agriculture subsidies. But Obama voted for this year’s farm bill, a $307bn package stuffed with yet more subsidies. Between 1995 and 2006, federal corn subsidies, which are provided through a myriad of programmes, totalled $56.1bn. That’s more than twice the amount given to any other agricultural commodity, including American mainstays like wheat and cotton, and 105 times more than was paid to tobacco farmers.

Over the past few months, Obama has repeatedly worked to paint McCain, who favours more domestic drilling for oil and gas, as a handmaiden of Big Oil. That’s an interesting charge given that Obama has spent much of his tenure in the Senate carrying water for Big Corn.

Original text here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/04/uselections2008.biof…