Feed your Car or Your Family? Tragic Consequences of Irresponsible Priorities

Feed your Car or Your Family? Tragic Consequences of Irresponsible Priorities
By Gil Villagrán, MSW
A fill up at the gas station has become a luxury purchase for anyone earning median hourly wages. With the average cost of gas at $4.50 a gallon, a midsize car needs more than $50 to fill up, and an SUV will gulp down almost $100. Many families have two or more workers with two or more cars to get to child care, schools, and jobs, everywhere. So the cost of feeding our cars is taking a bigger bite of our earnings. For those with long commutes to work at low wages, the drive may become more costly than the earnings, and ironically, some may not be able to afford to work.
The cost of gasoline has tripled since George W. Bush became president, when gas cost was $1.46/gal. You may recall that even as the Bushes were moving into the White House, Vice President Cheney convened his Energy Task Force, with members' names withheld from the public, and their energy plan still secret after eight years. You may also recall that securing Iraq's vast oil deposits, second only to Saudi Arabia's, was one major reason for our invasion of Iraq.
So what happened? Was that the Cheney plan: to triple the cost? Recall that Bush and Cheney are oil men, former CEOs of petroleum extraction companies, and as the law of supply and demand, a basic tenant of capitalism, demands: when you decrease the supply, yet maintain the demand, the value (costs) goes up. War in an oil field is one sure fire way to decrease supply-it is difficult to extract oil, refine it and ship it when the infrastructure is blown up. Also, wars suck up gas for humvees, tanks, and aircraft by the millions of gallons per minute. Less supply and more demand is certain to increase costs and thus profits.
Yet Americans and the world must brace for even more frightening consequences to the market force of higher cost petroleum-based energy. The cost of gas will increase the cost of food, and those without the means to purchase fuel will be no more able to afford food. This is to a large major the consequence of the irresponsibility of all governments to create infrastructures that ensure local food production based upon sound ecology in all regions, mostly for local residents. What is grown in a region should and traditionally did supply local people, with some export to nearby regions.
However, seeking ever higher profits, massive global corporations increasingly own or control food production. Most food is now transported more than one thousand miles, some across oceans and continents, which multiplies the cost to the consumer. Food production for profit has replaced food production for affordable local consumption. Thus a country may grow massive amounts of cash crops for sale, but not enough vegetables and grains for its citizens.
Governments may be pleased with income from export food revenues, but the people may no longer be able to afford locally grown food, and even less able to afford imported food. Thus coffee pickers from Central America and corn farmers from Mexico desperate to feed their families must leave their land and families to earn a livelihood as illegal immigrant workers in the U.S.
Furthermore, one third of current U.S. corn is converted to bio-fuel to feed vehicles and it takes twenty pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat. So the question is: shall we feed cars and livestock, or people? It is unlikely that any American will starve, though food insecurity has increased during the Bush years. But it is certain that global starvation will increase and we shall reap bitter consequences of our irresponsible national and global priorities.