Even if the price double to $2 a kilo it will be better than spending $3 a lb for bread. It is hard to work tortillas into your diet if you are not use to them. But it can be done. Cornbread is another good one if you don't like tortillas.
It tastes strange, no offense, hard for majority of the population to adapt I guess. People will still go for $3 a lb for bread. Taking for eg China main staple is rice, hard for them to change to corn too even if you subsidize corn prices.
Current interest in ethanol fuel in the United States mainly lies in bio-ethanol, produced from corn. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_the_United_States
Apparently this is the year of the potato...globally... And Japan has no butter with which to soften their potato!!! Could be a bad summer for bread too, U.S. export futures were around 15 billion busshels /mo while the ag dept. recommends about 1 billion It would almost be funny if we ran out of wheat & gluten grains, or even if bakers cornered the market. It might be transitioning from a staple & filler to a semi-luxury - reserved for fresh bread, good beer, and desserts.
US has huge stockpiles of surplus butter and milk. You will have to switch to drinking sour mash corn whiskey from Beer. There's still plenty of corn. But if the US keeps making ethanol from it, we will run out of corn too.
I am so very tried of hearing this! The oil companies have spread this lie. Ethanol is made from animal-grade corn, not intended for human consumption. The corn would otherwise be fed to cattle to produce less than one pound of dried beef for every 60-100 lbs of corn, depending on hormones, etc. If we stopped feeding the corn to cattle and stopped eating meat, all the corn could be used for fuel and it wouldn't touch the food supply. As it is, the problem is actually that food-grade corn is not profitable for a small farmer, and they haven't been producing for many years now. Get educated about ethanol corn. Humans don't eat it. The quality is trash. The food shortage has other causes, mostly economic. There is plenty of food being produced. Distribution is the problem. Please stop spreading this noise about ethanol. IT IS A SMOKESCREEN!
My philosophy is that we still have plenty of room to grow more corn if there was a huge demand for it. Have you ever drove down the interstates and realized just how many acres are wasted between each side of the road? I personally think a HUGE amount of corn (or whatever crop is desperately needed) could be grown there instead of just letting grass grow and paying someone to keep it mowed.
isn't meat food too? and dairies? dropping meat and milk for fuel doesn't have a good idea to me. Perhaps if ethanol was the only choice for fuel maybe, but it is not.
Learn something about the price of oil and oil profits. http://mises.org/story/2940 Not calling you a Marxist, but Marx was a left icon. He was also an economist. Understand economics. It's how the world works. And if we all dug a mass grave and jumped into it, we could save the planet.
OMG-you quote this absurd, stat-mangling apology for the oil companies to support the idea that ethanol is tied to the current food shortage? I don't get you Guerilla...your other posts don't seem so neocon. What do you think I don't know about economics in relation to this issue? Oil companies make a huge profit, Chevron reported record net last year. What has this think-tank trash to do with why ethanol-->food shortages? Your post is off-topic...are you trying to resume our earlier debate? You can accuse me of ignorance, but I think that's just a tactic, because you haven't shown me anything new or demonstrated that diverting cattle feed for fuel purposes has anything to with food shortages. Everyone keeps mindlessly repeating this, I'm just setting the record straight. And I'm not sure who's behind the attempt to smear biofuel, but I know who will lose their business model if we grow all our own energy. Liquid sunlight. Biofuel is the answer. Not corn, no, but corn is only being used because of current production and surplus. You can keep pumping oil company profits in your car if you want to, but I refuse to feel bad because I burn recycled vegetable oil in my bus. I am not causing one person to be hungry by doing so. I am burning waste. Ethanol can also be made from waste...
My Aunt from Brazil makes rice and black beans with every evening meal An Italian American friend makes a big bowl of pasta with the evening meal EVERY night Me? Pasta one night, rice the next, potatoes the next and bread the next [/QUOTE] Time to start eating tortillas. At $1.19 a kilo they are a great bargain and go great with ground beef, cheese and beans.[/QUOTE] and rice I think when someone puts out a story like this they just cause people to go out and horde. I haven't seen any shortages while I've been shopping not at the grocery or at the cosco where I do my shopping.
I already told you, I don't conform to the left/right paradigm. I'm not a neocon, and I'm not a socialist. I'm a libertarian, specifically a minarchist, leaning towards anarcho-capitalism. Who knows, I might even be a left libertarian one day. Hysteria is not a substitute for rational discussion. Human action and economics are intertwined. You cannot understand one without the other. Mises is known as the "Last Knight of Liberalism". Maybe it's time for you to expand your intellectual horizons. We could probably be friends and find some common ground if you would just chill out a little.
You're probably right on the last point. I don't care what ideology it espouses, the argument in that article is stupid. Comparing publishing profits to to high-volume oil profits is not economics. The inflation argument ignores how the real cost of drilling and transporting oil has decreased in absolute terms with advances in geology and drilling technology. It also ignores the short-term petro-inflation 2002-2008 during which a 4-fold increase occurred. How does your "Phd Candidate" explain that? The price was $1.00 gallon nearly everywhere in 2000. Was it being sold below cost at the time? The Mises article is juggling numbers and diverting attention. All I want to know is this: what economic factors that I'm not understanding are linking biofuel production to food shortages?
I can be an agreeable guy when I'm not dealing with a fanatic. It's amoral. The argument is a product of the numbers. Not the other way around. That's why you should pay attention to the ideology. This "think tank" doesn't produce legislation or accept corporate sponsorship. Hunh? Supply and demand. The basic economic factors. If you understand that all resources, including time are scarce, factors of production will shift to areas of demand and profitability. Those biofuel demands are artificially created by government subsidy, not market demand. I could go on and on, but if you're not interested in a calm discussion, where we bother to address facts, instead of dismissing them because you don't like the conclusions they lead to, then it's pointless.
He's comparing statistics apples and oranges. Just because other industries have a higher profit margin does not mean the price of fuel is not being manipulated. These raw numbers do not say what they say they do. I'm not interested enough to delineate them, but there are a number of unmentioned factors that undermine that article. I mentioned the way in which profit margin as a concept is abused in the article. The statistics in the article are deliberately misleading. There is no logical relation to the expected profit margin of industries which are structured differently from the oil companies. If your point is that the price of petro-products is inflating due to general economic factors, that's nonsense. Please address my comment about the four-fold increase since 2002. The article implied that the price of oil is consistent with inflation and is perhaps too low. If he's not being paid by oil companies to say that, he must be high on gasoline. You can list any statistics to demonstrate a tendency. That's why I so frequently resort to them. Umm..what is your point? We've already proven that ethanol production has nothing to do with the food shortage. Now you just want to call names.
I'm "rationing" all the rice I can find. I will soon be a major exporter of rice to Egypt and wherever else, once the price doubles or triples. I have filled my garage, pool, spare bedroom, and several warehouses with this stuff.
If you want to consider discussing further, perhaps you can explain why oil is up. And why soy beans are up. And why wheat is up. And why silver is up. And why gold and platinum are up. And maybe you can explain why an ounce of gold today buys almost as much oil as it bought in 2002. Who is name calling? And, I'm done with irrational arguments, insults and eco-fanaticism. Have a nice day.
I am quite fanatical in my opposition to the war. I also am quite serious about biofuel, I use it and have studied the issue for several years. The demand for biofuel is virtually infinite, since it is fuel which can be produced at a lower cost than oil. In fact, ethanol 10% gas used to be .10/gallon cheaper because it saved money to spike the gas. It had little to do with the environment. The production cost for every class of biofuel is actually much less than for petro-oil, but because the products compete and supply is small, biofuel is sold for the same price. If the true cost of biofuel production were reflected at the pump, and it were added as an option at filling stations worldwide, everyone would switch. Biodiesel can be made at home for about 70 cents/gallon. It could easily be made available a massive basis for $2.00 and crush the oil companies into the ground. However, that would require a policy change, and whatever other disagreements I have with Resident Bush, I do applaud his comments regarding switchgrass research. I think that's a great place to look. The fuel crops of tomorrow won't take away from the food supply at all-not in terms of land, because infertile lands can be used to grow weeds for fuel. Not in terms of farmers-most family farmers are teetering if not out of business completely, biofuel could be a cash crop to restore the family farm. 70 cents a gallon! And you say the demand is artificial! Do you want fuel at that price? With the proper infrastructure, it can be a reality with a decade. The demand is growing, not just for ecological reasons, but reasons of foreign policy, cost, and promoting locally produced energy. Virtually every vehicle on the globe could be supplied with biofuel, but that won't happen with corn. Developments such as switch grass, cellulose waste, and algae will make it a much more viable option. In the meantime, corn farmers are making a bit more than they were on cattle feed. That's because feeding grain to cows is so inefficient. Again, and this is my point, none of this affects food production. Food farmers continue to produce food crops. These crops were intended for confinement feed lots, which produce the fattiest beef in the world which is sold primarily at fast food restaurants. No, it's not food. Not part of the world food supply which is experiencing a famine caused, I suspect, by production methods and the use of GMOs among other factors. The hunger problem is caused by overpopulation, but it's very convenient to claim that ethanol production is the reason. Simple minds will take it at face value.