Ethanol to bump up food prices

[GliderGuider]

Demand for fuel cuts into corn crop

WASHINGTON - Ethanol will devour 50 percent more corn this year, eating into the food industry's share of the crop, the Agriculture Department said this week.

From breakfast cereal to beef to beer, competition from ethanol could raise prices for all kinds of foods.

People don't eat the kind of corn that makes ethanol, but cows, pigs and chickens do. And people eat other grains that will become less plentiful as farmers plant more corn. Demand for ethanol is pushing feed prices higher and enticing farmers to switch from other crops.

Farmers are expected to grow a record 12.2 billion bushels of corn in 2007, said Keith Collins, the department's chief economist. An estimated 3.2 billion bushels will go into ethanol, up from 2.15 billion in 2006.

The production of fuel ethanol from food grains is a crime against humanity.

[jandad2007]

1. Hate to break it to ya

But food prices are already up...especially meat prices...

[GliderGuider]

5. The core issue is not the price.

It's whether we should be using food to run our cars.

[INdemo]

9. Yes but.......Some manufacturers only need an excuse to raise

prices even though they may not be directly affected by the increase in grain prices.
the problem is we have all these ethanol plants going up and a small percentage of automobiles that can use it....

[razzleberry]

25. how does ADM benefit from high corn prices?

AMD, their angle seems to be..

buy corn, at world prices,
sell ethanol, at world price

seems to me the winners are farmers

[robinlynne]

2. Guess what. Ethanol can be made from ANY crop. sugar, potatoes, wheat.

The corn lobby made it be from corn. most countries do not use corn, but sugar which is cheaper adn faster to produce.... Ethanol is simply alcohol. You can use the alcohol we put on cuts to fuel a car, or vodka, basically any kind of alcohol. This technology isn't even new. They're jsut making it into a big deal here. Brazil wants to export ethanol to the US, but....

[GliderGuider]

3. Of course.

The issue is whether we should be using food to run cars. This is just an example of what happens when you try to do that.

[kestrel91316]

17. Well, the end result could be less obesity AND less driving, because

the competing interests will drive both the cost of food AND the cost of ethanol fuel up. That would not in and of itself be a bad thing.

I'm just trying to think of some good that could come of this mess........

[Ikonoklast]

6. Brazil is the #1 exporter of ethanol to the U.S.

They are switching over more land to sugar cane production for ethanol, out of soybeans. We import as much ethanol from Brazil as they can sell us.

[Shallah Kali]

7. Industrial Hemp, Switchgrass (which is a hardy perennial), and more

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel#Yields_of_common_crops_associated_with_ethanol_production

according to the above link switchgrass would create over 3 times more ethanol than corn. also it needs little fertilizer or herbicides unlike corn. BTW with a perennial crop they don't need to plow and replant each year. Less plowing means less CO2 released from the soil. it sounds to me so far that switchgrass would be a better option for ethanol.

[GliderGuider]

8. There's a little problem with switchgrass that people don't like to talk about

There is no commercial process available to turn cellulose into ethanol. There is a research plant here in Ottawa, but that's it. There is no reliable estimate on how long it will be until commercial cellulosic processes are available, or what their capacity might be.

[Ikonoklast]

4. Not really correct, 'could' is the operable word

Food grains for human consumption should remain relatively stable. Animal feed is another thing entirely. What is left from the ethanol distilling process is easily converted to high-protein feed that is more easily digested.

Corn for use as cattle feed is a waste of corn. It was used because it was cheap, not that it is particularly good for beef production.

Also, more arable land is being put back into production that was previously left fallow. That increased production and higher yields should make up for any difference that ethanol production may squeeze out of the market. Many types of food grains are grown where it just not feasible to raise corn.

[amandabeech]

16. Cattle need more than just DDGs.

I have seen reports that there is a glut of DDG on the market in the corn belt. Without energy-intensive drying, the stuff is heavy and expensive and energy expensive to transport.

A lot of fallow land is not suitable for corn production. Much of it is better off idling--it is thin, poorly drained or steep and prone to gullying. It is really not that good for grains, period. Hay or pasture, maybe. If you're going to use it for more than that you're really getting into heavy-duty fertilizer usage.

Other grains are generally grown where there is not enough rainfall or cheap irrigation water for corn. Those distilleries use a huge amount of water. In southwestern Minnesota, in drought country, the water goes either to the distillery or the fields. There really isn't enough for both. At least not now.

[hunter]

10. That's the point. To raise food prices.

More hungry people are good for neocon imperialism. Ethanol production is a way of expanding industrialized farming throughout the Americas.

The idea that ethanol could ever replace a significant fraction of fossil fuels is absurd, but it certainly does the job of raising food prices to the point where impoverished people start hurting and causing trouble, especially for those governments that refuse to be puppet states of the U.S.A..

I'm becoming convinced that subsidizing ethanol, as we do in the United States, is a covert form of economic warfare, simply because there are no good reasons to use corn or sugar cane derived ethanol as fuel. This is all about taking land unjustly and tightening the political control major corporations have on governments.

[robinlynne]

11. ethanol can easily replace fossil fuel. Brazil did it. brazil is exactly the same size as

the US. same populaiton. probably has less cars, becuase epople only tend to have one car at a time, but....

[GliderGuider]

12. Sorry, but no.

Here's a link with some of the facts of the case: Brazilian Ethanol Fantasies

One of the latest future energy options has been “biofuels”, especially the “successful” Brazilian experience with ethanol. We are told that thanks to the wide use of ethanol Brazil is independent from foreign oil imports and now is energy independent. The truth has been oozing out from Brazil and it’s not exactly what the advocates have been saying. We have not been told the truth and more importantly, the advocates are repeatedly misrepresenting energy events in Brazil.

(snip)

Contrary to what we’ve been told, ethanol in Brazil is not a major source of fuel for cars, and is not the prime reason why Brazil need not import oil any more. By going all out in ethanol production in 2005 Brazil produced 282,000 barrel/day of ethanol, most of it from sugar cane, not corn. That is, except for a few states which can raise sugar cane this solution is not applicable to the US.

However, Brazil gets most of is car fuel from onshore and offshore oil in Brazil, not ethanol. Its oil production of about 1.9 million barrels per day far outpaces its ethanol production. This oil production capacity is slightly larger than what Brazil consumes per day. That is, there is no need for oil imports. Several more oil rigs are scheduled to go into production before the end of the year. In fact if the numbers are correct, there really is no domestic need for the ethanol either. What’s more, we learn that 80% of the CO2 emissions in Brazil come from deforestation, much of which went into the farming of sugar cane.

(snip)

It’s regrettable that the ethanol advocates distorted the Brazilian energy situation. They have omitted about 90% of the energy picture there. It gives false hopes to those believing that ethanol is an energy cure-all. It is not. Advocacy should never be permitted to trump the science and engineering realities of energy.

There is no solution for America's fuel problems to be found in Brazil, I'm afraid.

[robinlynne]

13. very wrong article my friend. It is a long story. Ethanol was in most cars 20 years ago, until

exxon and shell were able to change the laws. This is the same thing that the oil companies and GM did with the wonderful electric cars in california. It is back, ALL cars can use ethanol. ALL cars. Too tired tot ell you the whole story, but it has been a success for a long time. the only problem there ever was with ethanol, was in small fiats in the 80s, which would stall if the car was driven through water. other than that, all went well even 25 years ago. And, as I said before, if you're not near a gas station, you can easily pour anything "alcohol' into your gas tank and off you go.
have done it myself. many times.
As for Brazil being self sufficient. it always had a great amount of oil, but the REFINERIES were American! That is why they went ethanol. They were not permitted to refine their own gasoline. Ethanol is not an environmental issue in brasil at all. It is purely a self reliance issue. It can be/ and is made from coconuts also, which grow wild in northern brazil.
sorry but I'm from Brasil.

[GliderGuider]

14. I'm not saying Brazil hasn't made effective use of its sugarcane-derived ethanol

I'm just saying that ethanol hasn't made Brazil independent of gasoline. Production figures from Wikipedia indicate that Brazil's ethanol production is something over 40,000 cubic metres per day, which is about the 292,000 barrels per day quoted in the article. Brazil's oil production in 2005 was just over 1.7 million barrels per day. Brazil thus gets only 10% of its fuel energy from ethanol. While Brazil may be independent of imported oil, they are not independent of oil itself.

Again, I'm not saying that Brazil is doing poorly with its ethanol. Rather, I'm saying that the circumstances are totally different in the USA, and that Americans should not look to Brazil for a recipe for independence from their 65% of imported oil.

[hunter]

19. Ethanol is a way of funding the expansion of industrial agriculture.

That's all it is, economic warfare against indigenous farmers all across the Americas, even here in the United States, where the "family farm" has been driven to extinction in so many places by industrial scale monoculture.

If you could measure the human misery and environmental destruction in a gallon of fuel, ethanol is more toxic than gasoline. Ethanol for fuel strips independent people of their dignity and turns them into cheap labor.

[Dogmudgeon]

15. Guns or Butter; Food or Fuel

When expensive fuel is in competition with cheap food, guess which wins and guess which loses. And business won't wait for switchgrass tomorrow when they can get rich on corn today.

This isn't a matter of finding the perfect solution; it's a matter of finding an acceptable solution.

Bad times are coming. And you'll "go vedge", all right. You'll have no choice -- and no B12 pills, either.

--p!

[gravity]

18. Ethanol is a waste

It's not an effecient means of producing energy, and raising food prices hurts everyone especially the poor.

Oil right now produces the same amount of co2 that ethanol does anyways when it combusts, so I really don't see any advantage to it. It's cheaper just to not burn the crops and use oil instead, since the net effects are the same.

Ethanol will never be able to replace our energy needs, so we need to research better technologies for the future.

[razzleberry]

22. ypur co2 needs HAVE to be supplied by the Middle East?

or you are not happy...?

[bananas]

24. the advantage is that plants get their carbon from CO2 in the atmosphere

All the carbon in a plant came from CO2 in the air,
that's why biofuels are considered carbon-neutral,
the carbon released from combustion is inhaled by the next crop,
so there is no net increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.

[NickB79]

26. But we use fossil fuels to grow crops

Huge amounts of fossil fuels, actually, in the way of fertilizers and fuel. Biofuels may release less CO2 than simply burning the fossil fuels directly, but they are not carbon-neutral.

[4dsc]

20. Corn yields will be down this year

This is a very misleading article.. While farmers may want to plant 12.2 billion bushels doesn't mean it will happen.

There is already talk about a cool summer and a dry winter(El Nino) and that is not very good for corn growing..

[GliderGuider]

21. Just because yields will be down doesn't mean acreage will be.

Corn will still force out other crops to the same extent on an acre-by-acre basis.

[Javaman]

23. And who will be the big winners here?

Agra-corp, AMD, etc. We are seeing the birth of the new energy giants. However, not only will they be suppling our fuel but because our food will be rising in prise, they make out like a bandit there was well.

Check out my journal on this. "the rise of the ethanol giant"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x50825

[Javaman]

27. The question is; Which foods will go up?

most of the off the shelve prepackaged stuff that Americans love to stuff in to their guts contain corn oil, corn syrup or corn additives.

The massive beef industry subsists on it, as does the pig and chicken industries.

Read the packages. Don't buy things with corn by products.

the explosive rate of diabetes in this country is directly linked to corn syrup used in prepackaged foods.

By local. By grass fed beef.

eliminate corn from your diet.

Corn on the cob or just packaged corn provides very little in the way of nutrients.

Don't get me wrong. Corn ethanol is a fools paradise, but feeding into this mass hysteria that we won't be able to feed ourselves if we use ethanol based on corn is pure stupidity. We shouldn't be eating this crap to begin with.

If the FDA eliminated corn by products (I know that would make you laugh) we would be a much healthier nation.

[GliderGuider]

28. The thing that worries me most

Farmers switching land from crops with more useful purposes (like barley for beer) into corn production. I agree about avoiding food with corn content, especially "high fructose corn sweeteners". I also advocate against eating beef, even if it is grass-fed (though I still eat some myself) because of the methane issue.