US soy farmers worry on global warming policies

Soy growers are finding it hard to follow the Obama administration's latest effort to control global warming, stating it could threaten the Midwest's biodiesel and soy industries.

 

The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed new rules that would factor in damage that American soy production can inflict in faraway lands like Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia.

 

The rules, proposed last week, mark another step to combat global warming, a problem made worse when carbon-filled forests go up in smoke in order to grow fuel and food.

 

However, these rules may potentially damage not just the American soy growers but also in other foreign countries. The "indirect land usage" will be hotly debated in Washington in the coming weeks while the biofuels industry argues that the EPA deployed unreliable methods in calculating how much biodiesel and ethanol contribute to climate change.

 

Two years ago, the Congress has mandated the greatly increasing the requirement for using ethanol, made from corn, and biodiesel, made heavily from soy, as a means to reduce dependence on foreign oil.

 

That was a boon to corn and soy farmers in Missouri and elsewhere. But the nation's Renewable Fuel Standard requires that the alternative fuels reduce pollution to qualify for the government mandate.

 

The new EPA rules, designed to develop next-generation biofuels, project the emission reductions far into the future. Corn-made ethanol is granted exemptions over the next several years, but the effects on biodiesel could be immediate, industry officials say.

 

Soy production for fuel requires more land than corn, and its imprint on land use around the world is calculated differently by the EPA. The agency believes that if more US-grown soy is used in biodiesel, other countries will convert more rainforests and other environmentally sensitive land to produce soy for food.

 

The biodiesel industry, already suffering from the recession, lower fuel prices and new European tariffs, this year may produce less than half of 2008's 700-million-gallon output. Many plants have been idled or are producing little now. Missouri has eight biodiesel plants; Illinois has six.

 

And now, complains Joe Jobe, CEO of the Jefferson City-based National Biodiesel Board, his industry could be left out of the federal mandate to require alternative fuels and thereby become the first in the country to be regulated for greenhouse gas emissions.

 

Jobe's organization, allied with the St. Louis-based American Soy Association, plans to aggressively challenge the new rules during the 60-day comment period, which began last week. About half of biodiesel comes from soy.

 

They contend that the EPA based its land use calculations on imprecise modeling and outdated satellite photos of rainforest damage during a period when little biodiesel was made.

 

The new rules point to a reality long overlooked or simply discounted -- that farming, like the economy, is a global proposition governed by cause and effect.

 

Growing corn and soy in the US for energy changes planting habits not just in the Midwest but around in the world. Studies have found that cultivation of new croplands to fill gaps in the commodities market leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that hold massive amounts of carbon.

 

Farmers and speculators in Brazil have converted vast tracts of land to soy, pushing cattle ranches deeper into pristine Amazon territories. In March, the Brazilian government reported that 9,650 square miles of Amazon rainforest had been destroyed or damaged in a one-year period ending last July, a two-thirds increase over the previous year.

 

In Malaysia, meanwhile, developers are swiftly converting forests into palm oil plantations for vegetable oil.

 

Tim Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton University, co-authored a peer-reviewed study last year concluding that biofuels contribute heavily to greenhouse gas emissions when land use decisions are factored in.

 

Searchinger said that diverting food crops for energy may be replaced by plowing new land. Converting US soy into biodiesel, it might be replaced on the world market by palm oil from Southeast Asia, he said.

 

A day after the EPA proposed its new rules last week, the soy industry was making its case on Capitol Hill, arguing that biodiesel reduces pollution when it displaces oil. The EPA, soy growers said, acted on "faulty assumptions, flawed analysis and misplaced penalties."

 

A statement from the American Soy Association asserted that soy biodiesel is the cleanest burning biofuel "and is not responsible for international land use changes."

 

However, Illinois soy farmer Phil Corzine acknowledges the connection from the perspective of someone who also grows soy on his 1,500 acres in Brazil.

 

According to Corzine, "a lot of what (the EPA) is saying is true ... adding that using "a significant amount of land for biofuels, you're going to force production to Brazil and you're going to have to find new areas to grow it."

 

Still, Jobe of the National Biodiesel Board grows frustrated wondering why his industry has to shoulder the blame.

 

He said that some sectors are insisting that the biodiesel industry is accountable in the United States not only for our own carbon dioxide emissions, but for hypothetical international emissions decades into the future, based on decisions by millions of people around the world.