"Enjoy your 'corn on the Cob' while you can" by 2022 There won't be any!

"Enjoy your 'corn on the Cob' while you can" by 2022 There won't be any!(BW).YOU would be forgiven for thinking a stake had been driven through the heart of the ethanol lobby in Washington, DC. The contentious tax credit it used to get, which put $6 billion a year of taxpayers’ money into the pockets of wealthy agri-business concerns, expired on January 1st with barely a whimper. Faced with demands for an end to the subsidy from critics on both the left and the right of the political divide, bio-refiners who use maize as their feedstock seemed simply to have accepted their fate. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
The reality is that, despite this summer’s scorching temperatures and record drought, America's maize farmers are doing just fine. Their corn is currently selling for around $8 a bushel—four times its price in 2005, and up over 30% since June. The handouts had become virtually irrelevant anyway, thanks to a mandatory requirement that demands an increasing amount of corn-based ethanol be used to dilute petrol sold at the pump. The petrol Americans put in their cars nowadays contains up to 10% ethanol (E10). In the Mid-West, where many of the bio-refineries are located, a blend containing 85% ethanol (E85) is also available for so-called “flex-fuel” vehicles. Lately, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved a blend with 15% ethanol (E15) for use in ordinary petrol-powered vehicles built from 2001 onwards.
For all this and more, ethanol producers can thank the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which established a controversial mandate known as the Renewable Fuel Standard. Originally, the RFS programme required that 7.5 billion gallons (28 billion litres) of renewable fuel (ie, corn-based ethanol) be blended annually into petrol by 2012, to help reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, cut oil imports and keep the farm lobby in clover. Following the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, the mandated schedule was upped to 13.2 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol annually by 2012, rising to an unprecedented 36 billion gallons by 2022.
Today, around 40% of America’s field corn goes to making ethanol for blending purposes.

But consider this: if 36 billion gallons of ethanol are to be produced from corn, America will be diverting all its current field-corn capacity to ethanol production by 2022. 

To meet the needs for just domestic animal feed, as well as ethanol production, farmers will then have to devote additional acreage normally reserved for food crops to growing yet more field corn. Whether mandated or not, market forces will impel them to do so.
The world has already witnessed the negative knock-on effects of America’s food-to-fuel mandate. The United States accounts for 60% of the maize exported globally. Apart from providing feed for cattle, pigs and chickens, corn flour is a staple for millions of people in poorer parts of the world. With agricultural-commodity prices everywhere on the rise again (corn futures are up 50% since early July), the bread riots of several years ago are threatening to return. And so the law of unintended consequences wreaks its merciless havoc.Read the full story here.