Is al gore's "biodiesel" from crop conversions what's driving grain prices so high so that people are hungry?

Question

are you stocking up?

Answer 1

Oil is driving grain prices up.  Oil is driving up the cost of everything.  Everything you buy, whether it's grain  (in the form of bread) to clothing to a new video camera has to be shipped their via a semi.  And the higher transportation costs are driving up prices.  Oil is the number one cause of inflation.

Answer 2

No, it's the conversion of staple crops into fuel grade ethanol.  Bio-diesel use is trivial by comparison.

Answer 3

Actually it's corn-based ethanol that's driving the prices of corn so high.  Hardly anyone uses biodiesel, and it usually comes from vegetable oil.  Corn-based ethanol is heavily pushed by Bush, by the way, not Gore.

"Environmentalists Need to Help Fight Bush's Ethanol Surge"

http://www.energybulletin.net/25558.html

Answer 4

while some of the answers above blamed high gas prices, which is true, .... but so is this:

“It takes around 400 pounds of corn to make 25 gallons of ethanol,” Mr. Senauer, also an applied economics professor at Minnesota, said. “It’s not going to be a very good diet but that’s roughly enough to keep an adult person alive for a year.”

Rajendra Pachauri of the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, has warned that climate campaigners are unwise to promote biofuels in a way that risks food supplies. “We should be very, very careful about coming up with biofuel solutions that have major impact on production of food grains and may have an implication for overall food security,” ...

so to answer your ? - yes, corn for ethanol is a contributing factor in the skyrocketing food prices ...

Answer 5

The whole thing is a scam to make money .Global Warming is stupid and taught by our schools.

Answer 6

The high price of gasoline and diesel is making everything more expensive.  Using alternatives such as natural gas, hydrogen, electricity, and ethanol to power your car lowers the price of gasoline by reducing demand for gasoline.  This in turn is the only way to lower gasoline prices and thus the higher cost of goods (including grain).  Oil has a far larger effect on the price of grain than biofuels do.

Answer 7

"The oil companies fund the environmentalists. They're both on the same side of wanting to restrict supply,"

"When the oil companies are able to make hundreds of billions of dollars in profit, they're not going to come along and tell the American people that oil is abundant, that we are never going to run out of it, that we're finding increasing resources."

Answer 8

The reasons for increased food prices are many varied, but bio-fuels are barely a conrtibuting factor. Low crop yields in the worlds "breadbaskets" last year has led to increased prices (low supply, high demand). It has also led to mass consumers, such as China and the Phillipennes, hoarding stocks in order to supply their own populations, which has further led to a net downturn in global exports and imports.

The rising cost of mineral oil has also had an effect- increasing costs to all producers has caused rising fuel prices.

The effect of crops being used for fuel is ammeliorated by the use of "set aside" land, which was left fallow, being converted into useful crop production. The food/fuel resources debate really only applies to future production if significant levels of fuel production are converted to crops on a global scale. This is quite a long way from happening. For example, the UK's promise  to convert 10% of its fuel requirement to environmentally sound methods would be achieved by using 60% of the currently available fallow land for fuel crops (sugar, rapeseed, sunflower etc.)

So the short answer to your question would be- No!

Answer 9

Any pressure on supply will increase prices, so yes, it is contributing to the high price of food.

Am I stocking up??

In a sense, I am.  I invest for the future.  Food won't go away, it will just cost more.

Answer 10

Read the crop reports with regard to the US corn crops from last year and their was no shortage for both Bio fuels and food but the government subsidized the Bio corn growers then turned around because the US has so little infrastructure to distribute Bio fuels and is in turn selling 90% of the US grown Bio fuels to the UK.

Just another BUSH boondoggle.