Food for oil?

Someone pointed out something to me today that hadn't occurred to me before, but should really be rather obvious, when you think about it:

Making food the new oil is a bad idea.

Okay, say someone comes up with a wonderful plan for making fuel out of corn syrup. Huzzah, we have a renewable resource, right? Well, not so much. You see, while you can grow more corn in a year that you can "make" crude oil in a century, you've got a slight problem in that there's still a hell of a lot more oil in the world than corn syrup... and we use more oil than corn syrup could possibly supply.

So, what happens? Corn syrup becomes a valuable commodity. We intensively farm it to the detriment of other crops (including, ironically, corn) - but for biofuel purposes, not food. The price of corn increases until it becomes too expensive for the average house-hold to have on the table once or twice a week. Corn - long a staple part of many a diet - becomes something out of the reach of most people. At least, if you wanted to eat it.

All those wonderful, traditional foods using corn flour and the like become prohibitively expensive, and the average packet of corn chips becomes either a) a luxury item or b) something that doesn't actually include any corn.

Oh, and we probably decimate the world's corn supplies, leaving us with only a few strains of corn that have been genetically engineered to produce a higher yield of corn syrup (and probably a kind of corn syrup that makes a better fuel for cars, and would be bad for human consumption, as likely as not). Hence the comment above about intensively farming corn being to the detriment of corn crops.

Now, extrapolate that so that they also make biofuels out of sugar and grain. Would you rather run your machinery plant or eat bread? Sounds ridiculous and far fetched? Look around you. If there is one thing our species does not do well, it's ration.

If the grain and sugar is needed to keep the wheels of industry turning, no one is going to think twice about whether we have enough left over to make bread affordable for the average family.

Face it, biofuels are not the smartest idea we could come up with. Unfortunately, we seem to think it is, so we'll probably stuff quite a number of things up right royally before we come up with something else.

Would someone out there like to come up with a Plan B, please? Preferably before sugar becomes so expensive that they stop giving it to you free when you buy a cup of coffee...