Maggie's Farm

Re Biofuels:

The argument made at Bizzy blog against ethanol is quite correct. I believe that starving people to save the planet is a feature, not a bug of biofuels. That goes hand in hand with not using DDT to control malaria bearing mosquitoes. Let them die and help decrease the surplus population, but I digress.

But having said all that, bad harvests do affect prices. Asia's rising living standards mean more meat consumption and that means more grain fed to livestock, and that affects prices too. Don't know if the 25% grain consumed by US ethanol plants includes the fact that at least a third of the grain entering the plants comes back out as livestock feed. Grain does not completely disappear into a black hole in an ethanol plant.

In addition, we have a declining dollar which makes our grain more affordable and that pushes up the price as well and there could be inflationary pressure (too much watered down currency chasing tangible assets) putting more upward pressure on prices.

Anyway, a long winded way of saying that while biofuels undoubtedly shoulder much of the blame for grain price increases they can't be blamed for the entire increase. There are a lot of other forces at work driving prices.

I don't like disingenuous arguments either for or against biofuels and laying all of the increased price of grain at the feet of biofuels is disingenuous.