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I was talking about crops that can be grown on a massive scale in this country, which knocks sugar crops out of the running. But if we are going to talk about imports, who lobbies for protection of the American sugar industry? It's not American ethanol producers or corn farmers. It's American sugar crop growers. They're the ones who want to keep sugar prices high because they know good and well they wouldn't survive if the going price of their product was cut in half. Ethanol producers, including ADM, would be happy to use sugar or molasses if they could get it cheap enough. They can't though and I'm not so sure they could if they could buy it on the world market without all the tariffs either. Tariffs aside, importing feedstocks for ethanol production will probably always be more expensive than just having the ethanol produced right where the feedstocks are grown and then importing the final product.

"..who lobbies for protection of the American sugar industry? It's not American ethanol producers or corn farmers.."

Ah, yeah. What you wrote is kind of a political truism.

Already there is a 54 cent/gallon tarriff on imported ethanol. Let me guess, was it the candy manufactures that lobbied for this? Was it the daily, urban auto commuter that did?
I
don't
think
so.

I'll take a guess. Farmers, ethanol producers, ADM.

Only and idiot would import low value feedstock for ethanol. They'd convert to higher value ethanol, and import that, which as I have stated, domestic subsidized greed heads that tell me ethanol is lower cost, has higher efficiencies than petroleum fuels....and that's why consumers have to be forced to buy it...but, not from cheaper imported ethanol sources.

At best ethanol is a stunt. Right now it is a pork-barrel, or I should say a ethanol barrel scam, ripping off the driving public, raising the cost of living and manufacturing and making the country less effective. It is a perfect storm of green delusion, greenback greed and political hackdom. As in Soviet socialism the only thing that makes this whole racket work is government force. Just as the socialist depend upon government force, that should give you a market signal as to the acceptance of the good or service by a free willing buyer. Lastly I am led to believe that cain is near eight times more productive than corn. I suspect that growing cain like plants for third world countries is very attractive. So, I don't see the US ever being able to produce ethanol as cheap as Brazil and Africa. So that means that the domestic producers, just like the domestic sugar producers will expect the American citizen to pay more, to be taxed more, for their ethanol scheme. End use fuel users will find themselves in the same squeeze as domestic producers. We saw this when President Bush kept the steel quotas up for a few loser mills. Steel end users complained that they couldn't make refrigerators, autos, ships with high steel costs. Just as these industries suffered so shall anyone that uses higher cost domestic ethanol fuels.