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Yeah, I remember the idyllic world before biofuels when the worlds poor weren't starving because of high prices but were starving because of our huge unused supply and artificially low prices that somehow made their starving people quit growing food.

It hasn't.
The price of the grain is such a tiny fraction of the price of the food.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m … _n25337007

I would imagine. It's a particularly lucrative business at the moment.

I've no doubt more land will go to the plow to meet or exceed the demands.

The money's not the issue. Agriculture can be cranked up but there's costs and we are in, or will be entering, a period where these costs will burden more than benefit.

And growing food and burning it in gasoline engines is bad policy. I cannot believe it is a good idea on an industrial scale.

Thermodynamics will not be denied. No policy statement or subsidy plan will alter that fact.

Cheap No More

Higher incomes in India and China have made hundreds of millions of people rich enough to afford meat and other foods. In 1985 the average Chinese consumer ate 20kg (44lb) of meat a year; now he eats more than 50kg. China's appetite for meat may be nearing satiation, but other countries are following behind: in developing countries as a whole, consumption of cereals has been flat since 1980, but demand for meat has doubled.

Not surprisingly, farmers are switching, too: they now feed about 200m-250m more tonnes of grain to their animals than they did 20 years ago. That increase alone accounts for a significant share of the world's total cereals crop. Calorie for calorie, you need more grain if you eat it transformed into meat than if you eat it as bread: it takes three kilograms of cereals to produce a kilo of pork, eight for a kilo of beef. So a shift in diet is multiplied many times over in the grain markets. Since the late 1980s an inexorable annual increase of 1-2% in the demand for feedgrains has ratcheted up the overall demand for cereals and pushed up prices.

Because this change in diet has been slow and incremental, it cannot explain the dramatic price movements of the past year. The second change can: the rampant demand for ethanol as fuel for American cars. In 2000 around 15m tonnes of America's maize crop was turned into ethanol; this year the quantity is likely to be around 85m tonnes. America is easily the world's largest maize exporter—and it now uses more of its maize crop for ethanol than it sells abroad.

It's a good thing overpopulation is no longer an issue, because that would just exacerbate all these other problems we've been having.

From everything I've read about corn biofuel it sounds like a very expensive joke to me.

jerwin wrote:

Cheap No More

Higher incomes in India and China have made hundreds of millions of people rich enough to afford meat and other foods. In 1985 the average Chinese consumer ate 20kg (44lb) of meat a year; now he eats more than 50kg. China's appetite for meat may be nearing satiation, but other countries are following behind: in developing countries as a whole, consumption of cereals has been flat since 1980, but demand for meat has doubled.

Not surprisingly, farmers are switching, too: they now feed about 200m-250m more tonnes of grain to their animals than they did 20 years ago. That increase alone accounts for a significant share of the world's total cereals crop. Calorie for calorie, you need more grain if you eat it transformed into meat than if you eat it as bread: it takes three kilograms of cereals to produce a kilo of pork, eight for a kilo of beef. So a shift in diet is multiplied many times over in the grain markets. Since the late 1980s an inexorable annual increase of 1-2% in the demand for feedgrains has ratcheted up the overall demand for cereals and pushed up prices.

Because this change in diet has been slow and incremental, it cannot explain the dramatic price movements of the past year. The second change can: the rampant demand for ethanol as fuel for American cars. In 2000 around 15m tonnes of America's maize crop was turned into ethanol; this year the quantity is likely to be around 85m tonnes. America is easily the world's largest maize exporter—and it now uses more of its maize crop for ethanol than it sells abroad.

Yeah, consumption of meat is going to cause much larger problems than ethanol related stuff. Beef in particular is especially bad. Its hideously inefficient to produce, it takes a ton of food and an obscene amount of water to put that steak on the table, when the nutrition you get out of it just isn't worth the input. A huge amount of deforestation going on (especially in the amazon) is to clear forest to make room for grazing land for meat animals. Plus, methane from cow farts is a significant contributor to global warming.

Yay!

bullsmurf

Farmerkev wrote:

It's an easy fix you know.
Everyone here can buy grain and give it to those starving people.
We'll just quit ethanol production from corn totally and you guys can buy that same amount and donate it.

Would corn ethanol even be competitive without government assistance?