Last week after a delicious Erev Rosh Hashanah meal I made the offhand comment that among other things eating organic food starves poor people. One of the other men at the event took issue and questioned the premise. He was so adamant that I decided to have another look into it. What I discovered surprised me.

All other things being equal (AOTBE) the yield for organic grains is about 25% less than for conventionally grown* crops. Grains are the staple food of the world. So in a constant world if we switched to all organic production of grains there would need to be 25% more farm land to keep the grain supply where it is now. But in the real world “organically grown” food accounts for less than one percent of the total food so the effect is probably de minimus. I had the direction correct but not the rate. There would need to be a lot more people buying organic food before it had any real effect on the cost of food for poor people.
Now to the surprise discovery. Although the effect of organic food production is small the effect of diverting corn production to ethanol (mandated by US law as an additive in gasoline) is large. According to a USDA funded article: “Ethanol production diverts a substantial amount of grain out of the food system. In 2011, the net loss to the food system from US corn‐ethanol production was about 3.3 percent of global grain production.” This is according to the article “more than the total grain consumed in Africa.” So I’m concluding that the energy policy of the United States is a significant contributor to hunger in Africa.

*By conventionally grown I mean with the application pesticides, weed killers and nitrogen from chemical sources.