The Coming Food Crisis: Blame Ethanol?

Here's an article from Forbes magazine on what they call "The coming Food Crisis"!  And, they may well be correct.........as the weltering heat and drought in the midwest worsens, some farmers are already cutting dead corn stalks as feed for their cattle.  This may get ugly before it's over.  More and more demands are being made for the EPA to stop the ethanol mandate for at least a year......

"Pete"
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The Coming Food Crisis: Blame Ethanol?

ENERGY – Forbes - William Pentland

A series of spikes in global food prices resulted in riots in 2008 and contributed to violent uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011. The culprit is a matter of considerable and frequently heated debate, but the most commonly cited candidates include market speculators, global warming and aggressive government renewable fuel mandates.

If you believe the folks at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Mass., the global food supply system is stumbling into a drought-induced supply shortage that could galvanize a global food crisis far more severe than those implicated in the widespread uprisings known as the Arab Spring.

In an updated version of a paper first published in September, Marco Lagi, Yavni Bar-Yam and Yaneer Bar-Yam considered the possible consequences of the prolonged drought in the mid-western United States, the worst in half a century, on global food prices.  The analysis, which relied on a quantitative model of historical food prices, concluded that the drought could amplify the impact of market speculation and corn-to-ethanol conversion policies on the impending global food crisis by an order of magnitude. To

(Read full article here:  http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2012/07/28/the-coming-food-crisis-blame-ethanol/)