This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 3:59pm and is filed under Media and information, Agriculture, Farming, Economics, Food Production. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
With floods causing untold amounts of damage to the well-being and property of native Iowans, farmers and wholesalers will also feel the blowback of this natural disaster. The Associated Press is reporting that corn and soybean prices have skyrocketed from the crisis:
CORN KEEPS CLIMBING: Corn prices pushed closer to $8 a bushel Tuesday after the U.S. Department of Agriculture said 12 percent of Midwest crops were in poor to very poor condition because of devastating floods.
SOYBEANS APPROACH RECORD: Midwest flooding has also inundated soybean fields, lifting prices near the all-time high of $15.96 a bushel.
And while Midwestern farmers must struggle to rebuild, their consumers are getting hit with more than just a steep price at the produce section. An editorial in the Dallas Morning News illustrates how vulnerable our fuel prices have become as a result of the country’s reliance on corn-based ethanol:
“Is it more important for people to eat or drive?”
The catastrophic Midwestern floods, and their likely effect on the U.S. corn harvest in a year of worldwide food shortages, makes the question relevant.
The reason? With the Corn Belt suffering big weather-related crop losses and global demand for U.S. grain rising, it becomes hard to justify putting corn into gas tanks via ethanol, rather than into people’s stomachs.
Add all of the taxpayer money we sink into ethanol and this flood has become a heavy burden for more than just Iowans. Has the way we approach food and fuel in this country left us vulnerable to the unpredictable acts of Mother Nature? That’s not counting the random shelf-pulls of the veggies that are near and dear to us. So far corn and tomatoes are off the menu. What’s next?
June 19th, 2008 at 12:46am
This is a tough subject, Suzanne. I think the media’s portrayal of ethanol as the villain of our oil and food problems is overstated. This is another of those issues that is becoming he said/she said. There are conflicting reports from respected authorities regarding how greatly food and fuel prices have been impacted by the small amount of corn directed to ethanol.
One fact that is frequently overlooked, is that the corn raised for ethanol is not the same corn you would buy in the grocery to roast on the grille. Corn for ethanol is often the type that is used for animal feed, so there is some merit in that it could affect food costs (the animals have to eat).
But the issue isn’t the fact that ethanol is an interim step in the path towards sustainable alternative biofuels (whether from switchgrass, cornstalks, sugar cane, etc.), it’s that the country needs a real energy policy, and reduce our dependence on oil. My pet peeve on this issue is that auto makers haven’t been required to increase the fuel efficiency for ALL autos, not just an average across the board. We are way past the point of believing that it’s “too expensive” for them to do so…it’s too expensive for our future NOT to.