Quote:
Originally Posted by fielderLS3
Subsidies like that are probably still in force legally, but corn prices haven't been low enough to trigger them for a while.
Corn for ethanol demand CAN be blamed in part for rising prices for other agricultural commodities, because when the price of one (corn) goes up substantially, production is shifted away from the other crops to cash in on the hot one, thus lowering the supply of everything else.
PS> I completely support your idea of algae based bio-diesel. It makes much more sense than ethanol for a whole list of reasons, particularly since diesel is in tighter supply than gasoline. If the free market where choosing winners and losers in alternative energy, and not lobbyists from important primary states, that is where the focus would be. The resources we are wasting on ethanol (which is more about vote buying than energy) would be much better spent on bio-diesel.
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But the problem with that logic is that it isn't food-corn being used per-say, and there isn't much (if any) acreage of corn field used specifically for ethanol. When you think of growing corn, you probably think most of it gets canned or frozen, with the rest being left on the cob and all of it is eaten by people. But in reality, that isn't how most corn gets used. The bulk of it is processed and used to make corn syrup, which I'm pretty sure is the most common source of sugar in the United States. When you do that, the byproducts are still useful and have 2 main purposes, either as animal feed or ... corn based ethanol feedstock. Right now, there is enough demand for 'regular' corn products that there is enough 'leftovers' to not cause farmers to have to plant more corn fields to fuel ethanol plants.