Biofuels Not to Blame for Food Prices

Cooler minds have realized that high food prices are caused by a large medley of factors. Global speculation, high energy and fertilizer costs, rocketing demand for livestock feed by China, extraordinarily cold weather globally, and local political factors all play a much larger role in jacking up food prices.

In Canada, FAO officials said in Senate testimony that recent price rises for grains are the result of falling yields and drought, not biofuels, and noted that wheat prices have dropped by 50 percent and corn was showing signs of entering a price decline phase. __Biofuelsdigest

Cooler weather across many important growing regions of the globe have set back planting dates and reduced growing seasons and projected yields.

Biofuels play a very minor role in this medley, yet are being used as a political football by opportunistic politicians, journalists, and bureaucrats. They play a cynical game, when energy supplies are already being artificially restricted by the US Congress and other opportunistic groups of corrupted players. They try to blame biofuels, but

...proving a direct causal relationship of large-scale, worldwide production of biofuels on world food prices, for example, is hard if not impossible because there are many other intervening variables such as the price of oil, yearly weather changes affecting harvest yields, increased demand from emerging economy countries, and general economic inflation, to mention a just a few. Source

When the bulk of biofuels manufacture moves beyond the use of food feedstocks, to the use of biowaste cellulosic feedstocks and cellulosic crops grown on marginal lands, the impact of biofuels on food supplies and prices will be even less than it is today. Unfortunately, politicians, bureaucrats, and journalists want to kill the biofuels baby in its crib before it can develop into the substantial replacement for fossil fuels that it promises to become.