Biofuels jack up food prices

The rapid increase in global biofuel production will push global corn prices up by 20 percent by 2010 and 41 percent by 2020.

Thanks to high oil prices and hefty subsidies, corn-based
ethanol is now all the rage in the world. But it takes so much supply to keep
ethanol production going that the price of corn — and those of other food
staples — is shooting up around the world.

The enormous volume of corn required by the ethanol industry
is sending shock waves through the food system. Wheat and rice prices have also
surged to decade highs, because even as those grains are increasingly being
used as substitutes for corn, farmers are planting more acres with corn and
fewer acres with other crops.

The specialist in the american magazin Foreign Affairs sad,
that if the prices of staple foods increased because of demand for biofuels, as
the IFPRI projections suggest they will, the number of food-insecure people in
the world would rise by over 16 million for every percentage increase in the
real prices of staple foods. That means that 1.2 billion people could be
chronically hungry by 2025 — 600 million more than previously predicted.