Quote:
Originally Posted by knowitman
While it is a different type of corn grown for ethanol production, it is taking up land that could be used for production of corn for human or livestock consumption which all eventually makes it way to the food supply.
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Once the sugar has been extracted from the corn for ethanol production its then used as animal feed, so its not really taking much from livestock.
It might be taking land which could be used to grow food for people, but if the farmers converted all their ethanol-corn crops to food-corn crops the price for corn would be so low that most farmers couldn't make a living off of it. There was a time not too long ago when farmers would be paid to
not grow corn simply to keep the price higher. I'm sure that this is no longer needed due to the demand for corn ethanol though.
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One other thing (this isn't specifically directed at anyone in this thread ... but it is a common criticism of corn based ethanol). For those that believe that ethanol is driving the price of corn up, take a look at these:
First is ethanol production
(source:
http://www.earth-policy.org/datacent...ofuels_all.pdf)
You can see it has gone up substantially in the last 6 years
now, the price of corn
http://futures.tradingcharts.com/chart/CN/M
While both have been trending upwards, there is a massive spike in corn prices from 2008, then it dropped just as quick. Seems there was something else that did that too ... oil:
www.GasBuddy.com
Perhaps this is just a pure coincidence that corn prices & oil prices are correlated. To be sure, we could check it against other grains. They're all produced in much the same way, but only corn is used extensively for ethanol. So if its chart looks different than say wheat or soy then there is still a strong argument that ethanol is driving corn prices
So, looking at the prices of
wheat,
oats, and
soybeans what do we see? They all fit pretty much the same pattern as both corn and oil. Crop prices are largely governed by the cost of the pesticides & fertilizers that are used, and those chemicals are almost always petroleum based.