“The reason it does is that the corn used for ethanol is EXTRA corn planted over and above what farmers would normally produce for food use,”
I myself wasn’t aware of that. But still, wouldn’t that land that is now used for ethanol production be used for some other grain, like wheat for example?
That would put at least some downward pressure on wheat prices. It seems to me we’re not better off fooling around with food like this. Especially since food inflation is potentially a real problem here in the U.S..
Not necessarily. In years past, many farmers would just not grow it. For decades, the US farmer has so overproduced corn that they were forced to sell it pretty much at or below the cost of production.
"That would put at least some downward pressure on wheat prices. It seems to me we’re not better off fooling around with food like this. Especially since food inflation is potentially a real problem here in the U.S.
The idea that there is likely to be large food price inflation is simply "idea fodder" for the folks who speculate in crop futures. A quick visit to the USDA website and a look at the crop situation will quickly disabuse anybody who thinks the US is likely to be short of food at anytime in the near future.
"The world" is having a food problem, almost exclusively caused by many countries not having a free market economy and ending up like Zimbabwe/Rhodesia, transiting from a major food exporter to basically starving to death due to their deadly attachment to socialism.
Wheat acreage has fallen dramatically over the last 20 years, but production has stayed relatively the same.
Most of that went to soybeans, not corn. Cotton and sorghum acreage have also fallen. Corn and soybeans have made up the difference, but at about 2-to-1 in favor of soybeans. Farmers ditched out of wheat because we stopped getting the winter cover of snow. They got tired of losing crops.