Higher Food Prices and Biofuel Production, There is a Connection

As everyone without the power to do anything about it already knows, the push for biofuels is the leading factor in the increase in worldwide food prices.

Despite what our government has been trying to push off as fact, a new study has proven they are lying to us. And here is why.

Biofuels is a new market with the potential of huge profit for corporate America therefore the American government is doing everything it can to ensure its success, even at the risk of causing millions of world citizens to go deeper into poverty or to die of starvation, even at the risk of costing millions of Americans more money at the supermarket, even at the risk of alienating American voters. Money talks louder than any group of protesters and any group of people writing blogs trying to get the truth out to fellow Americans who refuse to take the time to educate themselves to what is really going on.

The World Bank reports that biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% while our government holds fast to its claims that biofuel production’s effect is only 3%. Any thinking person can look at how much corn has been diverted from food production to biofuel production (over one third) and can reasonably conclude that food prices are going to suffer.

This report was completed in April 2008 and has yet to be published because the World Bank is worried about embarrassing an America President who has attained the lowest approval rating of any past President.

Also, the British government has withheld its own report on the impact of biofuels, the Gallagher Report, which states that plant based fuels have played a “significant” part in pushing food prices up to record levels.

Does anyone out there have any doubt remaining about where the loyalties of the powers that be lie? Those loyalties are certainly not with the voters who put them into office.

The U.S. government doesn’t want the everyday Joe to know that ethanol can be made cheaper from other non-edible substances because if a significant number of Americans know this then the government would look foolish over giving so much in subsidies to corn farmers. But then again the Bush administration has already shown that it doesn’t give a damn about what Americans want, it’s all about how much money corporations can make.

Bush continues his charade of the causation of higher food prices by placing the blame on higher demand from China and India. But the World Bank study disputes that "Rapid income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for the large price increases."

Even successive droughts in Australia, calculates the report, have had a marginal impact. Instead, it argues that the EU and US drive for biofuels has had by far the biggest impact on food supply and prices.

The report points out biofuels derived from sugarcane, which Brazil specializes in, have not had such a dramatic impact. But sugarcane for biofuel production does not create a large enough market as does corn for biofuel and therefore American corporations would not stand to make as much money from using it.

Producing and using ethanol would help ease global warming, to some extent, but why do we have to pay for this in higher food prices and more deaths?