Originally Posted by pinniped

Guys, you're wasting your breath ranting about ethanol. Nothing is going to stop King Corn. It's grown in too many Congressional districts for anything to change. It's grown all over Iowa, a very politically-important state.

Corn comes from red states, blue states, and purple states. Anyone seen the all-powerful switchgrass lobby lately? Does one exist? How many politicians could they ever own and operate as compared to corn?

Although ethanol might be only the 2nd or 3rd real driver of corn prices. Global beef demand is rising rapidly, in large part thanks to a few hundred million middle-class Chinese who can newly afford it. Bigtime beef demand requires more bigtime industrial feedlots, and bigtime feedlots require tons and tons of corn.

It makes me wonder...for every American who stops buying Big Beef and instead buys a grass-fed cow from a local farmer who uses a smalltime slaughterhouse, how many *new* beef eaters are coming online in the developing world? Probably hundreds or thousands.

So between putting corn into cows, putting corn into our fuel tanks, and liquifying parts of it to inject into the rest of our food supply, if I want to actually buy a cob or two to eat...that's more expensive. But that's also good politics.