Elsewhere in Dreams

On of the reasons that US is producing ethanol from corn is the huge install base (if you’ll pardon the comp lingo). Another reason is the awesome power of the agricultural lobby, what with their massive subsidies and whatnot. And though the install base of corn is awesomely huge, the amount of ethanol needed is also awesomely huge, leading to exactly what the agricultural lobby wants: higher prices for corn.

This is all fine and good, except that corn is in absolutely everything these days, what with the pervasive use of high fructose corn syrup in the place of good old cane sugar.

Why don’t they use cane sugar, you ask? Why do they use corn? The answer is, again, the agricultural lobby. There are huge tariffs on cane sugar, tariffs originally designed (iirc) to protect what is now a minuscule but still powerful US sugar cane industry.

Now, with all the shooting of feet that’s going on here, I have a way to solve the ethanol problem, lower the prices on corn (which is good for the economy), and keep the price of cane sugar high.

You people simply drop the tariffs on cane sugar and use that cane sugar to produce ethanol, something Brazil has already shown to be radically more effective than making it from corn, which happens to be one of the worst possible crops to produce ethanol from.

The rise in demand for cane sugar would keep the price of cane sugar high, the nation would keep feeding its insane addiction to HFCS, corn prices would stabilise, and pretty much everyone would win, including those sugar cane producers in marginally poor countries (and if you believe in trickle-down economics (a giant crock of shit, imho) this makes sense, right?).

So, using my genius and applied game theory, we advance the game (US corn production, sugar cane prices, the economy, the environment) from negative-sum (right now, everybody is losing) to positive-sum (they could be winning!). Not a win according to the expectations of the US agricultural lobby, certainly, but let’s not be selfish.

Tags: agriculture, ethanol, free market economics, game theory, genius, sugarcane

Tags: agriculture, ethanol, free market economics, game theory, genius, sugarcane

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 12:40 pm and is filed under main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.