Ethanol production pushing up dairy prices?

[GliderGuider]

Ice-cream makers frozen out as corn price rises

What’s the connection between ethanol, the biofuel produced from corn, and a cherry vanilla ice-cream?

Answer: the first is responsible for pushing up the price of the other.

This month, the price of milk in the United States surged to a near-record in part because of the increasing costs of feeding a dairy herd. The corn feed used to feed cattle has almost doubled in price in a year as demand has grown for the grain to produce ethanol.

(snip)

Prices for dairy products have also risen because of increasing demand from China and the Middle East along with the drought in Australia, reduced subsidies in the European Union and the rocketing cost of corn.

How long till we admit that the push toward biofuels is a horrifying mistake?

[razzleberry]

1. 3.40 /bu corn, is unreasonable? .n/t

[GliderGuider]

2. I don't think that is a useful question.

No matter what the price is, or what one's perception of its "reasonableness" may be, the fact remains that ethanol production is causing an upward pressure on food prices. A more useful question might be, is the rising price of food a reasonable trade-off for the benefits of ethanol?

To answer such a question, you need to decide what the benefits of ethanol are, what the overall costs of rising food prices are, whether the prices involved truly reflect all externalities, and if not how those externalities should be valued.

My back of the envelope calculations tell me that the benefits of ethanol in its current form are so low that any knock-on costs are unacceptable. That's even before the externalities of ethanol are added into the costs, so the equation can only get worse the closer you examine it.

The reasonableness of $3.40 a bushel is a distressingly superficial parameter on which to hang our decisions about the trade-off between food and fuel.

[razzleberry]

3. how much upward price-pressure is acceptable?

keep in mind that (EVIL)subsidies are
being eclipsed by prices

[GliderGuider]

4. IMO, none.

We should immediately abandon all large-scale ethanol and biodiesel production worldwide. It has the makings of a humanitarian disaster, as well as being a further injury inflicted on the less developed world by rich nations.

No blood for oil, no food for fuel.

Paul Chefurka

[razzleberry]

5. do you oppose all non-food crops

or just fuel?

[GliderGuider]

6. Your question is unclear.

Do you mean "Do I oppose the use of all non-food crops for fuel?"

If that is the question then my answer is, "I think so at this time." My primary objections are ecological. In nature there is no such thing as a "waste" product in the sense of a product that is of no use to any other organism. The suggestions I've seen for cellulosic ethanol, for instance, all revolve around the use of either agricultural waste or non-food crops grown on non-food-producing land.

The problem I have with the first suggestion is that agricultural wastes are in fact not wastes at all - they are needed to maintain soil quality. If they are removed to be processed and burned, soil remediation will need to be achieved by other means. That reduces the net energy of the process and even threatens its sustainability.

My problem with the second approach is that it involves the displacement of yet more non-human species and the appropriation of yet more of the planet's photosynthetic capacity for human use. The Deep Ecologist I have become is aghast at the idea that we could so casually ignore the other life forms that share our biosphere (and on which we are dependent to greater or lesser extents) in order to keep driving cars.

My preferred option would be see both our numbers and our level of consumption reduced until it is no longer necessary to rape the planet to ensure our survival.

[razzleberry]

7. certain/all non-fuel crops are horrible

cotton ... I live there. I know
leather, obvious
petroleum clothes, obvious
fur (not a crop, but clothes)
.
why do you pick on
corn, when I could go on and on
about other atrousities?

[GliderGuider]

8. I pick on corn because it's the largest source for ethanol in the USA today

Fuel and food will be the two defining global crises of the next 100 years, so it's a good idea to develop a thorough understanding of the issues. Corn ethanol illustrates the problem of the food-fuel linkage more clearly than any other precess.