I don't think any (most?) people are blaming the corn farmers.

They grow to the best of their abilities and sell to the highest bidder. That's the way the markets now work.

But subsidies for corn ethanol are fairly short sighted and single-minded based on all the data given on this page.

The fastest effect for oil consumption replacement in USA is efficiency and life style changes.

What would these people do after the whole US corn production was turned into biofuel and it still didn't make US liquid fuels independent? Burn wheat, barley and the rest of the cereals too?

It'll be interesting to see how this one plays out in the years to come. One way or some other :)

The poor and hungry of this world don't eat corn. Period.

Unfortunately, that's simply not true. Corn is a staple foodstuff in many regions of the world, including Africa, where it is made into a porridge known as 'Pap'. Maize flour is the primary ingredient used to make tortillas.

Last year thousands of Mexicans took to the streets in protest at a 400% rise in the price of corn flour which was threatening the diets of millions.

Poor Mexicans, who normally expect to set aside a third of their wages for corn flour, had always been particularly vulnerable to price fluctuations in the corn market, but a four-fold increase was both unheard of and potentially catastrophic.

The reason for such a substantial increase in the price lay north of the border. In order to wean itself off its addiction to oil, the US was turning to biofuels made from industrial corn like never before. Farmers in Mexico and America had been replacing edible corn crops with industrial corn that could then be processed into biofuels, leading to a decrease in the amount corn available on the open market.

Seems that a few facts got skewed in all the charts and figures.

In fact, 95 percent of the price inflation in all world commodities, including food and corn, is attributable to the inflation in the price of petroleum, not corn.

In fact, you can not even break even making 2.8 gallons of ethanol from a bushel of corn, especialy as the target cost of production to beat with all bio-fuels is now under a dollar a gallon. Some of the most efficient bio-fuels producers are now well under 50 cents a gallon cost, even as low as 32 cents a gallon in one case I noticed recently.

In fact all profitable corn derived ethanol producers make their profits on the co-products; they have to.

Corn co-products include the fuels; ethanol, bio-butanol, hydrogen, methane, 4 or 5 varieties of bio-diesels, jet fuel, prop plane fuel, bio-crude oil, bio-kerosene, bio-gasoline, bio-bunker fuel, bio home heating oil and syngas. A few of the other co-products all coming from any single kernel of corn are; High Fructose Corn Syrup, Corn Syrup, Dextrose, Crude Corn Oil, Corn Gluten Meal, Sweet Bran®, Dry Sweetners, Acidulants, Citric Acid, Anhydrous Citric Acid, Liquid Citric Acid, Sodium Citrate, Potassium Citrate, Itaconic Acid, Natural Vitamin E, D-Alpha Tocopheryl Acetate, Mixed Tocopherols, Phytosterols, FFA, Citrous Salt, CO2, Monosodium Glutamate, Threonine and Cyclodextrins. There are also hundreds of pharmaceuticals, industrial chemicals, plastics, animal foods, and human foods and food ingredients, all coming from the same kernel of corn as co-products of the various fuels produced.

Corn processors have a lot of choices in determining what co-products to make and sell.

The earliest corn processors only made ethanol and brewers grains, which went for livestock feed. Now at minumum, they are finding that due to competition, they also have to extract the corn oils to make a profit. Corn oil, like soy oil, is a negative in livestock feeding rations. The processors can buy inexpensive add on modules to get the corn oil out at the front of their process. They can make the oil into cooking oil or diesel fuel. Used resturant and factory food processing cooking oil is of course reprocessed into diesel fuel also.

There are over 4,000 corn ingredients found on grocers shelves. Any of them can be made as co-products along with most any of the fuels from any singel kernel of corn. They have a wide selection of income streams to go along with the the income from the ethanol.

In fact the more corn we grow for fuels, the more co-products the processors have to sell, including food. Ethanol production from corn makes more food, not less.

Right now we are only processing around a third of our corn at its optimal values. Simply feeding it to cattle as we have been doing is very wasteful. We should be processing closer to 90 percent of it to best uses. There is plenty of high protein food left as co-products after the processing for the other value added ingredients to meet Americas food and animal feed needs and export plenty too.

larryhagedon
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AmericanFlexFuelExperience/