“Corn is Better Food than Fuel,” read a headline in the September issue of Mechanical Engineering magazine (v.139, No 9, p. 11).  Having siphoned gas from a pickup truck in my youth—an efficient way to transfer gas to a dirt bike—I agree.  I’ll have the corn, please.  Hold the fuel.

All kidding aside, the piece in Mechanical Engineering was sharing findings from a National Science Foundation-funded study conducted by University of Illinois researchers Meredith Richardson and Praveen Kumar who concluded that the net social and economic worth of food corn production greatly exceeds that of biofuel corn production.  Richard Yuretich from the National Science Foundation summed up the researchers’ results in a post from the university:

Using corn as a fuel source seems to be an easy path to renewable energy.  However, this research shows that the environmental costs are much greater, and the benefits fewer, than using corn for food.

A couple months later, Mechanical Engineering published a response from a reader who suggested that it would be regrettable if corn based ethanol were abandoned in the United States over the food versus fuel argument (“Don’t Knock Ethanol,” Letters & Comments, November 2017).  The reader concluded:

If we were to give up the idea of corn-to-ethanol because of the food versus fuel argument, we would also have to give up all uses of corn for any purpose besides food.

So, should corn be used for food or should it be used for fuel?  And why, in 2017, is there a debate over the use of corn in the first place?

The answer to the second question lies in two laws passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by the President of the United States at the time, George W. Bush.  They were the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.  These laws led to the creation, then expansion, of the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS, “a national policy that requires a certain volume of renewable fuel to replace or reduce the quantity of petroleum-based transportation fuel, heating oil or jet fuel,” according to an EPA overview of the program.  It is a result of the RFS program that most gasoline sold in the United States contains 10% ethanol.

Absent the RFS program, we would debate the use of corn the way we debate the use of any other food product having alternative uses.  That is to say, there would be no debate at all.  As with other commodities, prices would direct the production and distribution of supply toward demand.  And so it remains with corn.  Despite appearances, the corn based ethanol debate is not first and foremost a debate over whether corn should be used as food or as fuel.  Rather, the underlying question is whether the increased demand for ethanol created by the Renewable Fuel Standard is doing more societal harm than good by distorting the market for corn.  Hence, studies that examine the social and economic worth of corn as food versus corn as fuel are not making an argument to limit the use of corn to food only, but are providing evidence that the RFS comes with a societal cost.  Therefore, to suggest that the results of such studies are advocating for the use of corn as food and food alone is a distraction from the fundamental question of whether the RFS does more societal harm than good.

If one wishes to advocate for the production of corn based ethanol, a more fitting approach would be to quantify the benefits of the Renewable Fuel Standard, which were meant to include reducing greenhouse gas emissions and U.S. reliance on imported oil, then compare those benefits to the societal costs of the program.  Even better would be for our elected representatives to critically examine these societal costs and benefits before passing such far-reaching legislation, make a compelling case that the benefits will surpass the costs, then agree to repeal the legislation if the net benefits do not materialize.  (Hope springs eternal.)

Photo credit:  MichaelGaida at pixabay.com.