Skyrocketing Food Prices, blame E10 Gas

Food crops were the dumbest source of ethanol, there are much better alternatives for ethanol production, this was just another push by agri companies to live off the government subsidies.

Here is another scam by our great farming industry:
Farm insurance fraud is cheating taxpayers out of millions - Los Angeles Times
Farm insurance fraud is cheating taxpayers out of millions.
Perpetrators falsely claim weather or insects destroyed their crops and cash in on a government-backed insurance program. Some don't bother planting at all. Others sell their harvests in secret.

Reporting from Sacramento — The federal investigator took the witness stand and described the crime scene: a sprawling field clogged with boulders, native grasses and knee-high sagebrush.
The defendant, a California farmer, had said the site was a 200-acre wheat field. But the investigator found no tilled soil, no tractors, no plows. In fact, she testified, she found no wheat.

The field was just a field — and a prime example, federal prosecutors allege, of a wave of agricultural insurance scams sprouting across the nation.
Such crimes are being perpetrated by farmers who fraudulently claim that weather or insects destroyed their crops to cash in on a government-backed insurance program. Some cheats never bother planting at all. Others sell their harvests in secret and then file claims for losses, collecting twice for the same crop.

One North Carolina tomato grower, armed with a camera and a party-size bag of ice cubes, created a mock hailstorm in his fields and swindled the federal government out of $9.2 million.
These growers — along with crooked insurance agents and claims adjusters — are using the program to bilk insurance firms and the U.S. government out of millions of dollars a year, according to prosecutors, industry officials and high-tech experts who review questionable claims for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Taxpayers are on the hook for many of those losses.

The federal government has been fighting back against such criminals, using satellite technology, advanced data-mining techniques and other tools to spot fraud. The penalties, too, have grown stiffer. These efforts have saved taxpayers at least $730 million over the last decade, by some estimates.

Critics, however, say that such high-tech oversight catches only the most egregious cases, and that insurance companies have little incentive to be more aggressive lest they lose lucrative federal subsidies to sell crop policies.

 

Gas prices are on the rise, as well. The thing is, It has Nothing to do with Demand.

Supply is at an all time high while demand is low.
U.S. Total Gasoline Retail Deliveries by Refiners (Thousand Gallons per Day)

 

Drought with prairie fires damaged Russian grain crop. Long drought, now floods, damaged Australian wheat crop. Drought damaged Chinese grain crops--they are trying to drill thousands of emergency irrigation wells. Swelling demand for imported grains to feed cattle in China, as the populace moves toward more meat in diets.

Not enough grain supplies worldwide, so US farmers are selling wheat at $10/bushel. One bushel of wheat makes about 63 1-pound bread loaves, so $0.16 worth of wheat in a loaf, whose average US price is $1.39.

There's a lot more going on in the world beyond corn ethanol.

 

A report from one day in the future says that Orange Juice will soon become a luxury.

Orange juice will soon be 'luxury' - Telegraph