Bush's Comment on Food Prices

It's amazing how big a deal it is. President Bush said something that is inaccurate, insensitive, and not very diplomatic. Understandably, we Indians are outraged. The papers in India are screaming for Bush's head. I've been reading about accusations, insults, and statistics flying about in all directions, and thought I'd verify a few of them (and as usual, digress on the way).

Are BioFuels an Obvious Good?
Pick up the English edition of the National Geographic Magazine, October 2007 (cover story "Growing Fuel - The Wrong Way, The Right Way"). This is a rather thorough article which discusses what different nations are doing with biofuels. It says that ethanol plants burn natural gas or coal to create steam that drives the fractional distillation needed to produce ethanol. Based on which studies you refer to, ethanol requires nearly as much to more carbon-emitting fossil fuel than it displaces. The article also states that ethanol distilleries are competing for corn with meat producers. Of course, this competition drives up prices.

That doesn't mean that biofuels are a bad idea. It's just which biofuel you choose. For example, let's compare ethanol produced from corn in the US to ethanol produced from sugarcane in Brazil. I've tried to draw some charts to help understand this better.

Let's compare the total amount of fossil fuel energy required to produce ethanol.
In case of corn, it looks like this:



The Indians are Eating Up All the Food!
Indian foodgrain consumption, in spite of the growth of the burgeoning Great Indian Middle Class, has fallen by about 10 kilos per capita over the last 5 years. As it stands now, it's about a fifth or a fourth of the American per capita food consumption. Blaming rising food prices on the growth of the Indian Middle Class is a little like the American reaction to the Tata Nano - "Oh my God, there will now be a billion Indians in cars polluting our dear planet". Lest you forget, a Tata Nano is _not_ a 1-mile-per-gallon SUV (and at any rate, there will certainly not be a billion of them anytime soon).

There's another statement I read in a newspaper, that the "US should not be diverting crops for fuel when many children in India are starving". In spite of this comment coming from my camp, the second part of the statement is not entirely accurate, at least from the Indian perspective. In case you didn't know, India produces more than enough foodgrains to be _completely_ self-sufficient. The problem, of course, is distribution. Our public food distribution system is anything but complete, and _that_ is why people starve or don't get enough food. Bush isn't always correct, but to blame starvation in India on him isn't really fair.

Short version of the story : Bush has had another attack of foot-in-mouth. Why is this even news?

P.S.: Part of me thinks that Bush is trying to get the American public off his back, and media attention off the fact that several states in the US are already feeling the pinch of increase in meat prices (fodder costs more now) and foodgrain prices due to large numbers of ethanol plants coming up in the Mid-West and surrounding regions. As I've said before - he's not as stupid as most of the people who call him stupid. :-)

Book and Movie Reviews

Over the past month, I've spent a good deal of time on Swiss trains. They're an absolute pleasure to travel in (at a non-negligible expense, mind you) and are a great place to catch up on your reading. So in these trips, I did a bit of reading. Mostly low-grade paperback fiction, but let me do a quick recap of everything.

i. "The Afghan" - Frederick Forsyth's latest work is very contemporary, just like all of his works over the years. Everything is well-researched and the details and tidbits of information are fun to read. The plot revolves around a former British Secret Services man with some Indian ancestry (and consequently, some middle-eastern features) and combat experience in the middle east who tries to impersonate a high-ranking Al-Qaeda leader held captive in Guantanamo. It's an intriguing plot and a very interesting read. Frederick Forsyth includes a lot of information on the political background and history of the Al-Qaeda and it makes for a very realistic story. There are a couple of extremely improbable (where improbable tends towards impossible) coincidences in the plot which sound somewhat amateurish. But that apart, it's an interesting read. Pick it up if you have some train/plane rides coming up!

ii. "The Day of the Jackal" - Having read his latest work, "The Afghan", I was curious enough to read his most famous (or second-most-famous, based on what you think of "The Odessa File"). "The Day of the Jackal" was a fantastic movie starring Edward Fox (who played a very convincing cameo of an unremorseful General Dyer in "Gandhi") as the Jackal. There's another extremely poor adaptation of this book named "Jackal" starring Bruce Willis as the Jackal. The story is set in France of the sixties, when Algeria was granted independence from France, and there were circles where Charles de Gaulle, the then President of France became highly unpopular for this move. The Jackal is a top assassin for hire who has been contracted by one such organisation, the OAS, to murder Charles de Gaulle. This book is about 10X more convincing than "The Afghan" and makes for a fascinating read. Not only is the narrative very engaging, but the methods that the Jackal uses to carry out his assassination are downright ingenous, and at the same time, realistic. Advice: Read the book first, and then watch the movie. The movie of course loses some detail when compared to the book, but is still very faithful to it.

iii. "The Alexandria Link" - Ever since "The Da Vinci Code" was written, I have run into tons of paperbacks written by people trying to dig out controversy from pseudohistory and make a fortune. In my opinion, what differentiates Dan Brown is his thriller-style writing - the controversy only helped his cause. The Alexandria Link, by Steve Berry, is built on the controversial premise that the land that is the country of Israel today was not the promised land in the Old Testament, and that the "real" Israel was in fact in Saudi Arabia. He has a very nice method of building and introducing characters and describing action. But the premise is so unconvincing that by the time the body count goes over ten, one wonders what the big deal is.

Movies:

i. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2006). I just ordered this DVD a few days back. I'm a HHGG fan, and I know practically every one of the radio episodes by heart. If you are a fan, and you like Peter Jones "as the book", and the jokes, witticisms, and top-quality voice acting that the radio series is so famous for, DO_NOT_WATCH_THIS_FILM. The point where Martin Freeman playing Arthur Dent tries to pull off the now-legendary "...counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying Vogonity..." is depressing, to say the least. If you're not a HHGG fan or have never seen a HHGG episode ever, DO_NOT_WATCH_THIS_FILM. If you do, you won't lose anything but you'll not tend to think very highly of HHGG fans.