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Comment by qeternity | Hacker News Reader

This is such a naive take. Most corn is used as feedstock. This is hugely important to production of animal protein, which humans eat.

Just because we don't eat the corn directly, doesn't mean we aren't eating the corn.

This would be like saying "only 1% of water is actually consumed by humans, so we don't need to worry about water shortages". The world just isn't that simple.

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It's not naive. It takes 10 times more corn to produce animal protein than it would have produced usable plant food for humans.

What does that have to do with anything?? If you're taking inputs that are used to produce food (feedstock, ferts, acreage etc) away from food production, this will create inflationary price pressures.

Source: career commodities trader

Exactly. We're taking 90% of usable food input and feeding it through an extremely inefficient plant-to-animal protein "converter". This is not only causing inflationary food pressure - it's directly responsible for hunger, environmental degradation and unimaginable pollution.

Fine, then argue that there are better ways to produce food.

This has nothing to do with ethanol mandate. Stop with these logical fallacies.

Are you suggesting someone is diverting feedstock corn to ethanol corn in such a way that we won’t be able to feed livestock?

That seems like it will be a popular political move, you should tell them.

There are two resulting forces:

1. Prices increase, incentivizing additional plantings to offset this new demand, and feedstock supply is unaffected.

2. Feedstock supply is reduced, and we raise less livestock.

The reality will be somewhere in the middle.

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