Should we grow crops to convert into alcohol for fuel and drinking or should we grow food? That is the fundamental question a new study asked in the journal of Land Use Policy . Despite extensive research on negative alcohol-related health impacts and food insecurity, few studies have quantitatively assessed the opportunity cost of allocating agricultural land to alcohol production versus direct human food production. This new study estimates the potential public health and food security benefits of repurposing U.S. alcohol cropland by quantifying the human body count.

Determining How US Alcohol Land Use Could Impact Global Starvation

This study estimates the potential number of human lives that could be saved annually in the United States by repurposing cropland currently devoted to alcohol production for direct human food cultivation. For this land-use re-allocation, this study develops a new method by determining alcohol-related crop land area, caloric yield, and quantifies human feeding capacity for four scenarios:

  1. lives saved by mitigating alcohol-related harms by elimination of alcohol consumption and
  2. additional lives that could be supported through increased caloric availability from food crops grown on the same land for hops, grapes, barley and corn for two scenarios (including corn used for ethanol fuel) 2a) ingesting food directly rather than alcohol conversion and 2b) replanting with higher yield food crops.

The Results of Converting a Tiny Amount US Alcohol Land Could Cut Global Starvation

The results of the study are pretty staggering. Eliminating U.S. alcohol production for drinking could prevent an estimated 178,000 deaths/year. These life savings, however, were small compared to the implications for food security. Results of the study showed repurposing (scenario 2b) America’s alcohol-dedicated cropland to potato cultivation yields the greatest potential human feeding capacity – an estimated 641.65 million people annually, exceeding the baseline of eating alcohol crops directly by over 50%.

What this means putting it into context is that only 2.1% of American alcohol-related crops would need to be converted to eliminate global hunger-related mortality entirely. By making small land use changes to eliminate alcohol consumption in favor of food production, public health policy could eliminate human starvation globally and save millions of lives annually.

Even though the human death toll from alcohol health related mortality was much lower than the lives that could be saved from growing food, it might be time to take another hard look at the alcohol industry as a whole and see it is can justify the costs. More work is needed to determine how to set up economic incentives to encourage this transition from alcohol to food. One obvious place to start is simply stop subsidizing alcohol production. Subsidizing corn ethanol is economically and environmentally indefensible as it costs consumers ~$164 billion per decade at $1,464 per ton of CO₂ avoided, emits ~ 24% more carbon than the gasoline it replaces once land-use change is counted, and occupies ~30 million acres (an area the size of New York State) to deliver energy that solar produces on just 3.2% of that footprint . That does not even include all of the other benefits of solar .