So basically, you just ignored pretty much everything I wrote, so you could keep repeating your deliberately oversimplified claim. Impressive :roll:
Unfortunately, it appears a formatting error prevented the charts from displaying. Although you've seen it before, I'll show the chart with global food prices and global oil prices. Again, note that I added a consistent indexed $75 adjustment to the oil price to make the correlations really,
really obvious:
View attachment 67244648
One point that should be obvious is that prices shot up in 2008 -- and
declined rapidly by December 2008. It should be
screamingly obvious that a Top Secret document which attributes the 2008 rise in prices to biofuels is obviously missing a critical component, because it doesn't explain that massive drop in prices. Nor does it describe any of the subsequent price changes.
What does explain it? It's on the tip of my tongue. Seriously! I can't see on the chart what it is -- oh, wait, it is
screamingly obvious that there is a strong correlation between food prices and oil prices. Since food requires energy at almost every step of the process, the causality is clear. In fact, it seems very likely that this is the primary cause of fluctuations in food prices.
And as we've discussed here and elsewhere, your primitive analysis ignores all sorts of of factors which impact prices, including:
• changes in demand for different types of food
• changes in crop yields
• production costs
• subsidies
• globalization of food production
• globalization of food markets
• weather events and climate change
• wasteful habits of food consumers in affluent nations
• monopolistic practices by Big Agriculture (especially Monsanto)
• the increasing consolidation of farms, especially in the US
• the development of better futures markets and methods of delivery
• the relatively small percentage of global grains used for biofuels
• the substantial portion of global grains used to raise livestock
• the fact that grains is only a part of global prices in the first place
• impacts of political changes, such as Trump's trade war with China
• how the rise in incomes for the poorest in the world changes
what the poor eat, which in turn impacts the
price of food overall
And yet again! You completely and utterly ignore that when prices for a commodity fall too much, then
farmers will not be able to produce the commodity. Corn, again, is so rock-bottom cheap that American farmers can't grow it without a subsidy. Your repeated claims of "low prices good!" shows the utter ineptitude of your understanding.
And yet again! Lots of environmentalists do not advocate for biofuels. The few that do focus on the use of agricultural waste, e.g. European environmental organizations are pushing for "second generation" biofuels (which are made from non-food/non-land based biomass, i.e. waste products). And yet, you repeatedly ignore this fact and keep blaming environmentalists for a policy pushed mostly by conservative politicians, who are in the pocket of Big Ag. Get it straight.
And if Woody had gone straight to the police, none of this would have happened!
I.e. Global food prices is an
incredibly complex subject that you clearly do not understand. Reducing it to one factor is every bit as flawed as blaming environmentalists for a policy that
they don't advocate.
Now do you see why people criticize you for holding such simplistic positions....?