Burning hundreds of millions of tonnes of staple foods to produce biofuels is a crime against humanity. Since 2007, the EU and US governments have given lavish support to agribusinesses to fill car fuel tanks with food – compulsory targets, and tax breaks and subsidies(pdf) worth billions annually. The result? Increased hunger, land grabbing, environmental damage and, ultimately, hundreds of thousands of lives lost. In 2007, the Energy Independence and Security Act set a national goal of producing 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels such as ethanol by 2022, causing corn and soybean production to soar and farmers to turn wild prairie into cropland. In the process, Taylor said, the majority of monarch habitats were destroyed. “Last year alone we lost 400,000 acres of monarch habitat just due to the conversion of grassland and wetland to crops because of the biofuel initiative,” Taylor said. “We’ve got 30 million more acres of corn and soybean than we had in 1996, most of which occurred after the ethanol mandate.” The habitat destruction ultimately led to the current all-time low monarch population, Taylor said. In just 17 years, the total area occupied by monarch colonies has dropped from 20.97 acres to just .67 of an acre.
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 20:15:03 +0000
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