CBO Calculates Ethanol’s Impact on Food Prices

According to a newly released Congressional Budget Office report, ethanol contributed between 0.5 and 0.8 percentage points (10-15 percent) of the overall 5.1 percent increase in food prices between April 2007 and April 2008. That estimate is considerably lower than previous estimates. The report also calculated the increase in costs for federal food aid programs, [...]

Setting the Record Straight

I was pleased to read AP reporter Deborah Jian Lee’s story on Jan. 12, saying that the food and fuel debate has “receded to a murmur, and even the Grocers Manufacturers Association, one of the most vocal biofuel critics, seems to be backing off a bit.” Biofuel producers will likely remember that last May the [...]

The Biofuels Update

Yesterday I was sitting around wondering what I was going to write about today, searching for inspiration, when it hit me — I’ll ask my twitter friends!  So I posted, “looking for the latest, greatest, hottest, info/news on biofuels.”
And that’s where the ideas came from for today’s post — Thanks to @EpicBear and @tomkimmerer for [...]

How Much Corn Is in a Barrel of Oil?

A segment on the Discovery Channel’s show “How Stuff Works” caught my eye this week and prompted that question. The segment points out that Xanthan gum, fermented from corn syrup, is used in oil drilling. Xanthan is combined with the drilling mud used to cool drilling equipment, and it helps to clear dirt and rock [...]

High Food Prices Hurt Consumers and Biofuels Companies

Yesterday, the New York Times wrote:
“A United Nations food agency called on Tuesday for a review of biofuel subsidies and policies, noting that they had contributed significantly to rising food prices and the hunger in poor countries.
With policies and subsidies to encourage biofuel production in place in much of the developed world, farmers often find [...]

A Tale of Two Studies

Don Mitchell of the World Bank’s Development Prospects Group has released an official version of his analysis of biofuels’ impact on the rise in global food prices. An early version of the study was leaked to the Guardian in London on July 4.
Mitchell attributes 70 to 75 percent of the increase in food commodities prices [...]

Purdue University Weighs In on What’s Driving Food Prices

The Farm Foundation recently released a report prepared by Purdue University agricultural economists on the forces driving food price increases. They conclude that higher food prices are the result of the complex interaction of global changes in supply and demand for commodities, the depreciation of the U.S. dollar, as well as growth in production [...]

Not a Secret After All

On Friday July 4, The Guardian newspaper of London published a story (“Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis”) about a “confidential,” unpublished World Bank report it had obtained purportedly demonstrating that biofuels are responsible for 75 percent of the global rise in food prices. “The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis [...]

Will the Press Set the Record Straight?

Last week, Roll Call revealed that the Grocery Manufacturers Association paid for a PR campaign aimed at blaming high food prices on biofuels (call it the ‘vast chicken wing conspiracy’). But since the revelation, there’s been very little effort in the press to set the record straight.
The USDA this week held a press conference to [...]

Food AND Fuel

There’s been a lot of hype lately over biofuels starving the world, and unfortunately there’s not better way to say it than that — hype.
Instead of having the knee-jerk reaction, of panic, we need to think carefully about the problem, for starters, we need to actually identify the problem.
In a recent op-ed in the Minneapolis [...]