Posted on 04/23/2020 9:27:04 AM PDT by Kaslin
Corn for Ethanol turns out to be a nice buffer of food, during a time of world wide lock downs, economic distress, and locust plagues in Africa.
DannyTN's Policy recommendation: Keep the ethanol program, Increase corn storage. Government can buy corn at cheap prices and give to food banks and famine hit countries.
Ethanol was conspicuously absent from my first post #8. In needed time to think about it.
From a farmer's standpoint, the pandemic has caused a dramatic drop in gasoline and ethanol products world wide. That means an excess of corn and corn prices are probably going to dramatically drop.
Indeed I just checked a chart and corn is at a 4 year low. Bad for farmers, but is a surplus of corn a bad thing at this time?
Africa is having an historic harvest of locusts this year, but not much else. I've seen articles those locusts have even reached southern China.
With the entire world on lock down, there's a question of the food supply. Is as much food as normal going to still be planted? Are local gardeners planting less gardens? Maybe they are planting more? I don't know. Is food going to be harvested as normal, and the supply chain still work as normal?
It's nice to have a built in food buffer for times like these.
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