Thursday, April 17, 2008

Ethanol: Blame for Food Inflation?

Certainly it plays a part in it. Even the average person has heard about, and probably been directly affected by price increases in food the last few years. How much does Ethanol play in that role?

According to the Wall Street Journal, surging commodity prices have pushed up global food prices 83 percent in the past three years, according to the World Bank - putting huge stress on some of the world's poorest nations allt he while we are promoting it in our Washington and office space Connecticut.

Many policy makers at the weekend meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank agreed that the U.S. policies pushing corn-based ethanol and other biofuels as deepening the woes. "When millions of people are going hungry, it's a crime against humanity that food should be diverted to biofuels," said India's finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram. (Now THAT's straight talk)

James Connaughton, chairman of the White House's council on environmental quality, said the U.S. is working on developing "second generation" biofuels that would use varieties of grass or agricultural wastes - not food - as source material. "That's where we need to get to go," he said.

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