I'm having a hard time not viewing politicians who vote for ethanol subsidies as murderers.  I don't mean this as a literary trick for the benefit of my blog readers, or some other sort of exaggeration.  I mean honest to goodness murderer, as if a Senator who voted for subsidies had put a gun to someone's head and shot them himself.

Food prices are skyrocketing, not just in our country (the growth is not as substantial here), but also in other countries.  The hardest hit are third world countries who import much of their food:

According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation, the price of wheat is more than 80 per cent higher than a year ago and corn (maize) prices are up by a quarter. Prices for vegetable oils are increasing at similar rates. The organisation also reported that the food price index, based on export prices for 60 internationally-traded foodstuffs, climbed 37 per cent last year, on top of a 14 per cent increase in 2006, and the trend has accelerated this winter.

The effects of this are already visible. Earlier this year protests erupted in Pakistan over wheat shortages and in Indonesia over soybean shortages. Egypt has banned rice exports to keep food at home and China has put price controls on cooking oil, grain, meat, milk and eggs. Food riots have occurred over the last few months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Uzbekistan, Senegal and Yemen.
...
Population growth and economic progress are part of the problem. Consumption of high-quality foods – mainly in China and India – has boosted demand for grain for animal feed. Add in poor harvests due to bad weather in places such as the US and high energy prices, and it is not surprising that prices are soaring. But the most important reason for the price shock is the rich world’s subsidised appetite for biofuels. Short-sighted policies are causing crops to be diverted to environmentally-dubious biofuels and, as usual, the burden is falling disproportionately on the poor.

Ethanol subsidies, which will do little to nothing to help our higher gas prices are literally killing people, either through food riots or starvation.  We are fortunate in this country to have the economic backbone to pay for higher food prices, even if it means we don't have as much money for other things.  Other countries aren't so lucky.  For them, our useless ethanol policies have real life consequences.

Do the politicians who voted for these subsidies and mandates even care?  Many of them are now talking about how these are "unintended consequences", as if that somehow should assuage their guilt.  But just because a consequence is unintended, doesn't mean it was unforeseen.  That's an important difference.  People said at the very beginning that this would lead to this exact result, including me.  So while they may not have wanted people to die, they certainly knew it would happen as a result.

And so knowing this, we have to come to the realization that the politicians who pushed for these ethanol mandates were perfectly willing to kill tens of thousands of people (or more), and cause hundreds of thousands (or possibly millions) more to suffer, in order to pick up the votes of a few thousand farmers in this country.  That is the math that they cared about.

Calling this an atrocity does not come close to being descriptive enough.