NATURAL PERSPECTIVES:

Lou and I listened to President George W. Bush’s last State of the Union address Monday. It was entirely predictable in most ways but remarkably surprising on a few points — environmental ones. He made two statements that could have come straight from the playbook of the Sierra Club.

The first represents a major change in U.S. policy about food aid to developing countries. In his address, Bush asked for the establishment of an expanded food aid program that would buy needed food from farmers in the countries or regions where people are hungry. Our current policy is to buy that food from American farmers.

America remains a major breadbasket for the world. America’s prodigious agricultural productivity is one of our nation’s greatest assets, along with our military’s might. We are to the world’s grain markets what OPEC is to oil. And for a long time we have been generous to poorer nations — generous to a fault.

When food aid is needed by poor nations, the U.S. responds to that need by shipping American grain to the hungry foreign masses. This is expensive, of course, but it has tremendous political support here at home, especially among American farmers. In order to give away American soybeans or grain such as wheat, corn and rice, the government has to buy it from American farmers. Often, the government is buying grain the farmers would have a tough time selling in saturated U.S. markets. Furthermore, the introduction of American food products overseas can represent a foothold in those markets that may create the opportunity for greater sales of our crops later. American farmers come out ahead in every way.

But often, American crops are not the type of food people overseas particularly want to eat. According to Peter Menzel and Faith D’Alluisio’s book “Hungry Planet: What the World Eats,” a family Bhutan in the Himalayas eats 66 pounds of red rice, 3.1 pounds of wheat flour, 3.1 pounds of red potatoes and 2.2 pounds of barley a week as their grains and starchy foods. A family in the Darfur province of the Sudan in eastern Chad eats 39.3 pounds of sorghum and 4.6 pounds of corn-soy blend in a week, plus 4.6 pounds of lentils, chickpeas, beans and other “pulses.” And a family in Ecuador eats 100 pounds of potatoes, 50 pounds of white rice, 15 pounds of ground wheat, 10 pounds of corn flour, 16 pounds of white flour, 8 pounds of pea flour, and 10 pounds of lentils.

Of course, if they are really hungry, people will eat just about anything. And people are hungry. According to the World Bank, about 1 billion people in developing countries live in poverty. They lack the financial means to purchase adequate food. But American products are often strange, literally foreign, foods to rural people in the tropical world. They may not know how to effectively prepare the food we give them. And what of the local farmers in those developing nations? They see our farmers simply as competition. And successful competition it often is — successful for us.

One criticism of food aid is that it tends to reduce productivity in recipient countries, thus perpetuating dependency upon aid rather than promoting increased local production.

For years, critics have asked if even a small portion of American food aid spending could be used to buy food on local markets in the regions where there is food need. This approach — used by many European countries — has two important benefits. First, it results in hungry people getting food more familiar to them. And, second, it results in stimulus to local farm productivity.

The old saying about teaching a man to fish is directly relevant here. For decades, American policy has been, metaphorically, to give people fish. The European food aid system is intended to, metaphorically, help them learn to fish. In the long run, the European approach is much more helpful.

Will the U.S. Congress respond positively to the president’s call? The farm lobby may not let it.

In what way is this issue environmental? All that American grain used for food aid has to be shipped at great expense from America to the recipient nations. That shipment would be an unnecessary expense if food could be procured at a closer distance to the place of need, saving untold amounts of fuel and carbon dioxide production. It’s the foreign policy expression of the locavore movement that Lou has written about so frequently in this column.

The president also had some shocking (for him) words to say about the major environment issue of the day, global warming. He called for new initiatives to “slow, stop and eventually reverse the growth of greenhouse gases.” Where on Earth did that come from? Is this the same Bush who for seven years has derided concern about potential climate change? Or is there a green side to the man that we haven’t seen before? State of the Union addresses are generally exercises in generalities, but in this case, Bush even went so far as to specifically call for capture of carbon dioxide emissions from coal burning power plants. Lou is suspicious that he just wants to promote burning more coal.

I went back and re-read some State of the Union addresses from previous years. To the slight extent that Bush addressed environmental issues at all, he issued calls for passage of his “Healthy Forests” initiative (designed to save America’s forests by cutting them down) and his “Clear Skies” initiative (designed to allow power plants to modernize without meeting the requirements of the Clean Air Act). He also threw his support strongly behind hydrogen fuel, an ideal fuel, especially for the natural gas industry since natural gas is the only realistic source of hydrogen for the foreseeable future.

My heart hopes for a greener Bush. But my head doubts.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at vicleipzig@aol.com.