PS: The reason I can't display the full article is that major news medias allow use of only the first 2-3 paragraphs into the article and the link to the full article without having to pay a very large re-use fee.
"Pete"
=================================================
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
