Should Thai cars be gorging themselves on Thai food?
By Jon Fernquest |
On Monday the Bangkok Post editorial asked the question:
"Should cars eat our food?"
Brazil has been in the forefront of the worldwide movement towards biofuels as substitutes for oil proving that "mixing oil with sugar cane, corn and soybeans can run most of a country's transportation."
(See photo on right, even motorcyclists are fitting themselves out with ethanol tanks nowadays!)
In Thailand new crop replacement programmes are already changing agricultural patterns. Palm oil and cassava have been affected the most:
News that palm oil and tapioca (cassava) will be in demand for programmes promoting biofuel has actually changed agricultural patterns - only a little so far, but measurably. Palm plantations have now been seeded in regions where the crop had seldom been seen. They have replaced some banana farms in the upper South, fruit orchards in the East, and even some rice fields in the Central region. In the past, cassava has driven farmers from rags to riches and back to rags. Now the crop is gaining new life on reports it will be used for biofuel, and fields of tapioca again are sprouting, particularly east of Bangkok.
"Taxpayer-funded subsidies for ethanol and bio-diesel" have spurred these changes:
Energy Minister Piyasvasti Amranand last week confirmed the national fuel fund would spend about 500 million baht this month alone supporting bio-diesel. A Khon Kaen sugar merchant said he expected his company's profits to rise 10% this year thanks to the ethanol programme.
Shortages of agricultural commodities and unexpected price rises with a panic shortly afterwards clearly show that the impact of crop replacement was not completely thought out and adequately planned for:
Even this small amount of crop replacement has caused strong reaction in the markets. Last week, the Internal Trade Department held an emergency meeting with traders to discuss the hoarding and shortage of palm oil, a popular cooking product. This joint government-public meeting agreed to urgently call on the Commerce Ministry to allow the immediate import of 60,000 tonnes of palm oil from Malaysia. That meant a rise in palm oil prices of 15 baht a litre, an unpopular move which nevertheless had to be rubber-stamped by a ministry with no alternatives.At the same time, the price of many snacks suddenly shot up in markets and supermarkets throughout Thailand. The reason for that was explained as a shortage of cassava. That is the polite way of saying farmers and more importantly warehouses and middlemen are hoarding tapioca in order to get higher prices when biofuel firms and food makers try to outbid each other for the raw material.
Of course, Thailand is not alone in experiencing these changes.
World wheat prices recently reached record levels when American farmers shifted from wheat to corn for ethanol production.
Policymakers need perhaps to better scrutinize biofuel policies and allow public feedback, suggests the Bangkok Post editorial.
The cumulative experience of other countries such as Brazil should provide a lot of answers and clues about the future effects of these programmes.
(Source: Bangkok Post, Op-ed section, 14-01-08, temp-link)
Vocabulary:
gorging themselves on food - eating so much food that you feel stuffed full of food
in the forefront - people who are more advanced and lead everyone else in an activity
a crop replacement programmes - government subsidies given to farmers to encourage them to shift to producing a different crop
from rags to riches - the happy story of how a poor person became rich
sprouting - appearing suddenly (like small plants popping out of the ground)
subsidies - money to reduce the costs of producing something and thus encourage people to produce it
ethanol - "ethanol (ethyl alcohol) is the same type of alcohol found in alcoholic beverages, it can be used as a fuel, mainly as a biofuel alternative to gasoline, and is widely used in cars in Brazil, because it is easy to manufacture and process, and can be made from very common materials, such as sugar cane, it is steadily becoming a promising alternative to gasoline throughout much of the world" (See Wikipedia on ethanol fuel)
bio-fuel - fuel from biological materials (biomass) such as sugar cane or corn that helps reduce climate change and reduces dependence on oil (See Wikipedia on bio-fuel)
bio-diesel - the most common biofuel in Europe and also experiencing phenomenal growth recently in the US, important since most commercial vehicles use diesel (See Wikipedia on bio-diesel and bio-diesel around the world)
spurred - caused
confirmed - verified, someone who knows the truth shares it with people who don't know the truth
national fuel fund - money used by the Thai government in carrying out energy policies
think out - thinking about everything that could happen before you do something
adequately - sufficiently, doing enough
hoarding - secretly store large quantities of things (because, for example, you expect their price to rise)
urgently - needs to be done very quickly
rubber-stamped by - approved by someone with authority
warehouses - large buildings for storing goods temporarily (while they are making their way from producer to consumer)
middlemen - buyers and sellers of a product between the producer and the consumer
outbid - offer a higher price
scrutinize - look at closely and analyze in detail a plan
feedback - when the people affected by a plan tell the people executing the plan how well it went after they execute the plan
cumulative - the total amount accumulated from a date in the past to the present
clues - pieces of information that help people understand something they are uncertain about
