And just because I love his cartoons, Michael Ramirez has his pulse on the situation:Well, it seems like the craze over biofuels is finally ending. Hailed as a great idea and with tons of government pushing for more investment, we see insane worldwide inflation, especially for foodstuffs. President Bush asks for $770 million more in world food aid. The new United Nation top adviser on food, Olivier de Schutter, quite simply calls any further investment in biofuels "irresponsible." However, he's much more calmer that the prior guy, Jean Ziegler, who called biofuels "a crime against humanity." Of course, once they killed all investments, we're back to our next problem: there will be a glut in global food prices everywhere and we'll see farmers everywhere starving yet again.
How many times do we need to see that once the government decides that it is going to "help", there is a huge bubble and then a massive self-correcting shock before we stop playing this game? Now it is biofuels, it was housing a decade ago, telecommunications before that (AT&T as a monopoly), the airline industry (just let something die!) and going back in American history, the railroads (leading to the "robber barons" and the need for antitrust regulation).
[Note: to top it off, Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug (leader of the Green Revolution) has a Wall Street Journal OpEd telling the Bush Administration to use actual foreign aid, buying food in Africa for Africans, rather that this disguised domestic aid nonsense the US does]
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