Why farm subsidies suck.

Printed in The New Hampshire on Sept 24, "From the Right" column

The current debate on America’s energy future is one of conflicting solutions and intense partisan divide. Over the past few years, we’ve heard many political leaders give new ideas on ways we can harvest “renewable energy” in order to quell fears of an energy crisis down the road (though some think its here, now). A decrease in the supply of oil (made ever smaller in large part due to US consumption) rears the threat of increased leverage in the global scene from some of our country’s not-so-friendly acquaintances, among who include Venezuela, Iran and Libya. We’ve heard it all before: “Our dependence on foreign oil is a threat to national security!” These fears are not unfounded, but the question remains: what is our best strategy for making renewable energy? The US Government is especially fond of corn ethanol. They love it so much that they’re willing to buy corn straight from the farm with tax money! Sounds like a great idea: we get more corn because corn ethanol is the answer to the crisis and our farmers make more money. Pretty soon this plan backfires, unintended consequences abound as corn is the only crop worth growing because the government made it profitable. More farmers grow corn, supply rises, prices fall and the farmers who grow the corn must rely on subsidies to keep growing corn like the government wants them to. Seeing as corn is a comparatively expensive crop to grow, this locks our corn farmers in a cycle of growing a crop with little profit. They make only enough to survive and with little potential to better themselves. Our government now must subsidize corn even more to keep the price up. Meanwhile, the American public has more corn than it knows what to do with. Do you ever wonder why high-fructose corn syrup is found in everything we eat nowadays? It’s cheap!

At the root of this crisis is not the lack of motivation in our nation’s investors and engineers to development new, sustainable energy strategies. It is the belief that the government can magically create new industries simply by diverting tax money to projects they favor. This may work in the short term, but with no profit-and-loss system determining these firms’ long-term success, they are destined to fail when the money runs out. It is not the job of government (and tax dollars) to support projects that are not yet profitable simply because of a decision made by our friends in far-away D.C. Those crying to Congress for “2 million energy jobs now” are wasting their time. Government doesn’t create jobs, everybody else does. The Green Revolution will take some time to fully develop, and it will likely be our generation who invents and finances the next wave of alternative energy sources. Hopefully the government will let us.

Last semester, the College Republicans and Diversity Support Coalition hosted a speech by Niger Innis, National Spokesperson for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). His main point on energy was that we should “let all flowers bloom” when it comes to new strategies; a free flow of information in the marketplace of ideas. After his speech, I went up to him and asked him what he thought of my idea: hemp ethanol. Initially he was worried that lands used for growing industrial hemp would be used to grow marijuana for smoking; I assured him that there would be no reason to grow marijuana in hemp fields. The tall straight hemp stalks would cross-pollinate with the short bushy marijuana plants resulting in weak stalk and weak herb: bad for both prospects. We’ll see more smokable marijuana grown in corn fields than industrial hemp fields. He revised his position. The facts remain; the positives of hemp ethanol vastly outweigh its cheap costs to grow. Fuel made from hemp seed oil has a closed carbon cycle, meaning any CO2 released from burning hemp is the same amount taken from its environment when it grows. With a short cultivation time of 3 to 4 months, over 100 times more hemp can be planted in one area than trees, a much more costly resource, to us and our planet.

Our government is subsidizing corn while banning hemp. That’s the problem with government sponsored investments: the winners are picked through arbitrary bureaucratic decision-making, not consumer demand. Prospecting investors for green energy developments need to see a possibility for profit in order to pledge their money to firms with the next big idea, but government distortion of the market only makes it harder to separate the good from the bad. It’s time to get government out of the energy business and leave it to the professionals. Oh yeah, and give hemp a chance!