This is not a surprise. It was well known that using food stocks to produce ethanol for our gas guzzlers would quickly contribute to much higher world food prices.

Corn ethanol is definately not an acceptable cure for liquid fuel higher prices and shortages.

With many more grain-corn ethanol plants under construction, the food shortage situation may very well get worse, specially if the mid-west weather acts up again.

A more effective measure may be to consume less liquid fuel by rapidly buying smaller more efficient vehicles, specially electrified vehicles such as PHEVs and BEVs. However, massive production may take another 2 or 3 years. Meanwhile, be prepared for much higher food and fuel prices.

Transforming wastes into usable fuel would be a better idea than using essential food stocks. Here again, it will take 4 to 5 years before a significant number of plants are built.

A certain degree of personnal demotorization may be unavoidable as many more people will not be able to afford fuel for the gas guzzler + food for their familly. Many will have a broken heart when their long term love affair with the huge 4 x 4 will come to an end.

I want to see this report. Because I wouldn't trust the Guardian for a dime.

The Guardian is known to be an extreme reactionary newspaper that has been lieing about biofuels like no other.

I stick to the scientific reports available, the most important one being that of Wageningen University, which shows that the contribution has been extremely marginal.

As is well known, Wageningen is the world's leading university and research center dealing with agricultural economics.

So the Guardian will have to show the report if it wants to make a point.

Until it does so, I consider the Guardian to be an enemy of the world's developing countries.

Or, like Lula says, the Guardian is one of the actors committing crimes against humanity by destroying the biofuels opportunity.

Middleoroad isn't very middle road, but wishes to drive further off the road to harvest more corn stalks to stuff in his bio-fuel tank. Middleoroad is blind to the upward prices of food, when gas tanks hog energy that would normally supply energy for human bodies. M is blind to the interconnectiveness of all food stuffs, nations & the world. But M is most blind to the poor who have no money to pay for food because M has the corn in his gas tank.

Food riots have killed or injured people or caused damage & looting in Haiti(4 dead), Cameroon (40 dead), Mozambique(4 dead), Egypt, Cote de Ivorie, Senegal, Yemen, Mauritania, Bolivia, Indonesia, Mexico, India, Burkina Faso, & Uzbekistan.

Following M & all bio-fuel advocate dictates will kill & wound more people & damage & cause more looting. The very poor have always starved. We have kept our eyes closed & did not witness the starving. U.S. & European bio-fuel policies are the direct death causing factors of the STARVED & the KILLED. But we surely will not see their deaths because we will more tightly hold our eyes closed.

How come we don't see reports about the impact on food prices by other non-food crops such as tobacco, cotton,sugar,tea coffee,...? Or what about quality land used for golf courses and shopping mall parking lots, sprots fields etc.

Let's blame it all on the World Bank:

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=79

Suspect political agenda skewing data. Is this report accurate? Well, it is certainly hard to see how corn used to make ethanol in the US drives up the price of rice in India. Does India import corn? Do they import American rice?

Food or fuel,
Sounds like a straw man to me. I thought hat question was already answered. The very real concerns have been answered, sourcing biofuels from food stocks and land degradation are serious issues that appear to be being addressed except maybe the corn ethanol industry (food)
And corrupt Asian palm sugar style deforestation's.
As food prices increase, so the economics drive the ethanol producers to the wall.
I mostly agree the world bank analysis is one eyed. The costs to agriculture from fossil fuel and doubling and tripling of fertilizer inputs changing climate and environmental degradation suggest the 75 -15% figures should be reversed.
The Murray - Darling river with intensive irrigation system provides over 80% of Australia's food supply.
Is basically in meltdown. The outlook is so dire that the only approach left (with the available understanding we have) is to see the (virtual) end of irrigation and (it goes without saying more widespread unviable farming).

That's certainly more than a 15% contribution.
If the remaining 10% is inflation, then most of that needs be added to the input costs.

Somewhere amongst this (I'm no economist) The same costs applicable to ordinary increase say now 24% can be seen as affecting bio fuels as well.
That is why IE the corn ethanol producers are shelving or abandoning projects and going bankrupt taking with them no small sums of subsidies and shareholders moneys.
2nd gen bio fuels have this in hand (at least the theory).

Secret report? The best I can tell, journalists are more interested in selling newspapers than feeding the hungry. When was the last time that hunger was caused by a food shortage, rather than some other root cause like corrupt governments using food as a weapon to control people?

I woke up in the middle of the night rethinking this "secret" report. We're all focusing on the wrong thing.

For three centuries, food prices have been declining in real terms (see Fernand Braudel's THE STRUCTURES OF EVERYDAY LIFE), resulting in dangerously low rural cash flows, flight of rural poor to urban slums, and inability to use best agronomic practices for food production.

The primary subsidy flow in food has been from producer to consumer, with a small return subsidy flow from government to producer to forestall collapse of the food production system.

Food production is primary; food price is secondary. Putting the major emphasis on price is the wrong focus.

World food production, after receiving a bump from the Green Revolution, is now struggling to meet the needs of a wealthier world wanting higher quality food, primarily meat, and continuing population increase.

The Philippines doubled their population in the last two generations without increasing rice production. Australia, once a major exporter of rice, has switched to viniculture because of long-term drought-caused water shortages in the Murray-Darling River system, as mentioned by arnold, above.

Whatever the reason for the recent spike in food prices, they have come just in time to rescue rural life and food production.

It is obvious for anyone with a brain, that bio fuel is not a solution to global warming. For most bio fuels, so much energy is used in the processing, that the net carbon footprint is often actually half of that fossil fuel gives. Even fossil natural gas is better than corn ethanol. Sugar canes and palm oil grow fast and efficient, but destroys the rain forest. There is simply not enough land to both feed the population and produce bio fuels for their cars. There are so many reasons, anyone really should be able to understand that bio fuels isn't a solution. Clean nuclear energy should be used for transportation, trains and electric vehicles.

Viticulture under threat,
Enhanced greenhouse implications for viticulure (which underwent explosve growth in the past several decades) are forcing producers to consider new ares for growing wine grapes.
Viticulture for wine production is a long term undertaking with mature vines and selection requiring stable climates and twenty year lead times.
Try google or your favourite search engine.

Commenting on secret or unpublished reports second or third hand is bound to be a tall order.

1; facts do not always equal truth.
2; the truth is not always factual.
Previous reports on this site have shown us that the E.U. various other bio fuel interests have already decided not to support food based biofuels, so in this sense the Headline grabbing leaked report is confusing - if not misleading depending on how informed the reader.
The organisations IE Oxfarm who are demanding action at the G8 summit opening in Japan are suppliers of food aid which we could assume is just the "basket of food " that is most adversely affected. That is corn or maize and wheat.

We do not know specifically which foods are included in the unpublished report, but the language and hints do suggest it refers to the bulk traded commodities that have been monitored on a monthly basis by their senior economist Don Mitchell.

No sane person should diminish or downplay the gravity or accuracy of the report, in the proper context.
This is a report released on the 3-7-08, one day prior to the Guardian article.

www.actionaid.org.uk/101377/three_nails_in_the_coffin_the_g8s_contribution_to_the_global_food_crisis.html

Corn ethanol does not cause farmers to change land use.

Corn ethanol uses feed corn which otherwise would go to waste. It merely fractionates the corn kernel to extract the useless starch. The by-product is an bio-active stimulant comparable to microbial enzyme supplemented livestock feed.

Corn ethanol reduces the need for corn acres as well as soybean acres. We have a very long way to go before all the cattle, swine and poultry feed is processed and the flour and sweet corn is even considered. Then we'd just be eating a Zone Diet of DDGS.