Word: cornes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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It’s a good time to be a farmer. Buoyed by rising demand for biofuels and the growth of the middle class in developing nations like China and India, corn prices have risen to $5.53 per bushel, an increase of more than 100 percent over 2006 levels. These gains, along with similar surges in the prices of wheat and rice, are poised to spur American agriculture to a record $92.3 billion in revenue this year. To top it all off, American farmers are still receiving $13 billion every year in subsidies from the federal government.If that seems strange...
...Needed: Fuel for Humans Having read "A Furious Hunger," I sadly experienced déjà vu [March 17]. As a food technologist, I daily receive disquieting information on availability and rising prices. Several companies I deal with are becoming desperate as stocks of flax and corn, to name but two examples, are virtually extinct. You were certainly correct to cite biofuels and bad harvests as the key reasons for this scarcity. Several of our suppliers readily admit they have sold their stocks of sugar, corn and rapeseed to biofuel manufacturers simply because they can make a lot more money...
...years, the big question was whether those reductions from carbon sequestration outweighed the "life cycle" of carbon emissions from farming, converting the crops to fuel and transporting the fuel to market. Researchers eventually concluded that yes, biofuels were greener than gasoline. The improvements were only about 20% for corn ethanol because tractors, petroleum-based fertilizers and distilleries emitted lots of carbon. But the gains approached 90% for more efficient fuels, and advocates were confident that technology would progressively increase benefits...
...razed overwhelms the gains from cleaner-burning fuels. A study by University of Minnesota ecologist David Tilman concluded that it will take more than 400 years of biodiesel use to "pay back" the carbon emitted by directly clearing peat lands to grow palm oil; clearing grasslands to grow corn for ethanol has a payback period of 93 years. The result is that biofuels increase demand for crops, which boosts prices, which drives agricultural expansion, which eats forests. Searchinger's study concluded that overall, corn ethanol has a payback period of about 167 years because of the deforestation it triggers...
...every kernel of corn diverted to fuel will be replaced. Diversions raise food prices, so the poor will eat less. That's the reason a U.N. food expert recently called agrofuels a "crime against humanity." Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute says that biofuels pit the 800 million people with cars against the 800 million people with hunger problems. Four years ago, two University of Minnesota researchers predicted the ranks of the hungry would drop to 625 million by 2025; last year, after adjusting for the inflationary effects of biofuels, they increased their prediction to 1.2 billion...