Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

The chorus of news reports is rising; time to be a food producer with
rising prices, and to be growing our own to beat inflation at home. We
recall that in the Depression of the 30's farm families with their own
gardens and root cellars fared better than their city cousins out of work
with nowhere to turn but soup kitchens. As kids my own uncles and aunts in
KS never had money back then but never went hungry either. 

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
------------------------------------------

from Agence France-Presse

Ethanol seen hitting food prices
October 23, 2007
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20071023.RETHANOL23/TPStory

/TPBusiness/America/

OTTAWA -- Attempts to reduce U.S. dependence on imported oil by adding more
ethanol to its gas tanks are only driving up food prices while delivering
moot energy benefits, a bank warned yesterday.

Corn prices have already jumped 60 per cent over the past two years as
American ethanol producers expanded capacity, said Jeff Rubin, chief
economist at CIBC World Markets Inc. In 2008, food inflation will top 5 per
cent and the following year it will approach 7 per cent, its highest level
in more than 25 years, he said.

"This diversion of an ever-increasing share of the American corn crop from
human consumption and livestock feed to energy production is putting steady
and unrelenting pressure on food prices," Mr. Rubin said in a statement.

"Soaring corn prices not only pass directly into animal feed costs and
corn-based food prices like tortillas, but they are spilling over to other
grain prices as farmers scramble to expand corn production at the expense
of other crops," he said.

Ethanol is used as an additive to gasoline, comprising as much as 10 per
cent of the fuel mixture in most automobiles. Ninety-five per cent of the
ethanol produced in the United States is distilled from corn.

The U.S. administration has set a target to raise ethanol production from
one billion gallons a year in 2000 to 35 billion gallons a year by 2017.

But Mr. Rubin insists this will have a "negligible impact on U.S. energy
independence."

Corn for ethanol currently accounts for 13.5 per cent of all corn
production in the United States, yielding roughly 6.2 billion gallons of
ethanol, which is equivalent to only a one percentage point reduction in
U.S. gasoline consumption.