Reposted from Foreign Policy In Focus
The breakfast that greeted me at my San Francisco hotel last week was bright, cheerful, and utterly appalling. The hotel management, with typical euphemism, called it a "continental breakfast." But only the denizens of the great continent of sugar -- which encompasses a large swath of America and some of its overseas dependencies -- could enjoy such a breakfast. There was a choice of Fruit Loops or Apple Jacks. There was an array of sticky buns, sugary muffins, and danishes, to which you could add a smear of jam if they weren't sweet enough. The fruit juice machine dispensed liquids that bore only a passing resemblance to their labels. White flour, high-fructose corn syrup, cane sugar: such a breakfast could get you through an hour or so of hyperactivity before the inevitable sugar crash.
Devouring sugar is a dubious way to jumpstart the day. It's also a dubious way to jumpstart our faltering global economy. Yet our leading scientists, policymakers, and energy mavens are pinning their hopes on sugar.
In the labs of corporate giants like DuPont and Cargill, scientists are extracting sugars from a variety of crops, plant oils, and even algae, fermenting them, and producing new chemicals and fuels. This latest biotech revolution sounds great on paper (such as the glowing press releases from these corporate giants). What, after all, could be better than replacing petroleum and coal, non-renewable resources, with sugar, which is everywhere, from the Fruit Loops on your table to the weeds in the your backyard?
Not so, explains Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) contributor Hope Shand. DuPont and Cargill "promise a greener, cleaner post-petroleum future, where the production of economically important compounds depends not on fossil fuels but on biological manufacturing platforms fueled by plant sugars," she writes in The Perils of the Coming Sugar Economy. "It may sound sweet and clean. But the 'sugar economy' will be the catalyst for a corporate grab on all plant matter as well as the destruction of biodiversity on a massive scale."
The first fruits of this biotech revolution -- biofuels derived from corn and other sugars -- diverted land away from food production and drove up prices, contributing to the ongoing food crisis. The next round might turn out even worse as the search for biomass to convert into the new fuels and plastics and pharmaceuticals threatens both farmers and the environment. Small-scale farming will face competition from huge biomass plantations owned by industrial giants like Cargill, and the forests that we need to fend off global warming will be cut down for corn and cane sugar production.
Grabbing a candy bar in the middle of the afternoon for a jolt of energy is the very definition of a quick fix. So is relying on doughnuts for breakfast. What goes up -- as we learn from Isaac Newton as well as today's financial pages -- must also come down. Building an economy on sugar, like constructing castles out of its granular cousin, is likely to be an unsustainable enterprise.
Subscribe to FPIF's World Beat here.