On oil prices and food prices

2. It’s a bit better for the environment to use organic fuels instead of fossil fuels

As far as I know the net gain for regrowable fuel is 0 or below.

• cutting down of forests, in order to have more land for fuelproduction (Brazil)
• all the “evil chemicals” used to increase/ secure the harvest
• great amounts of energy needed to actually convert the plants into ethanol

one oil expert said recently that real price of todays oil should be 50-60 USD

and the prices are above 120 USD

some say, much speculations are there and the big oil companies dont care for economies, people, they just wont ˝their˝ money.

And bio-fuel has not been proved to be any better for the environment in regards to CO2.  However, it has been shown to cause significantly more damage to the environment in other chemicals and compounds as well as being extremely unstable (which is why it has to be trucked, not piped like regular fuel.)

And the price of oil is all speculation.  People “think” the market is bad because the media’s been telling us the market is “bad” for the past decade.  As soon as people realize they were lied too, oil prices (and gold and all the other commodities which are currently insanely too high in value to be supported) will plummet in a Commodity Bubble Burst.

Neither has, or should have, anything to do with politics.  Both have everything to do with the media conglomerates creating yellow journalism to bolster sales to increase profit just like they did during the Spanish American War and other times in World History.  Remember, the media is in the business of making the news!  If there is no news, there is no media!!!  (The same can be said about commentators, disc jockeys, clowns, etc.  All out to make a profit.)

I say we’ll see a significant commodity bubble burst in 2009-2010.  By significant I’m talking a “correction” market of 20% drop on the top end, up to about a “bear” market of 30-40%.

agree with Jen

this whole ˝foodtobiofuelswitch˝ is stupid

but, personally i see a link between the two issues( food and oil), and not just some marginal one.

and its all at least partialy connected to politics.

Even if oil were priced in non-dollars, it would be expensive, for some of the reasons already listed:
1. Demand for light sweet crude soon to outpace supply, and not enough new fields to satisfy future demand. That’s why speculators are driving up the price somewhat- they can see the writing on the wall.
2. Instability in countries where cheap crude is found.

As China and India continue to modernize, OPEC will have their hands full just meeting world demand. There’s only so much easily pumped crude in the ground, and we’ve probably reached peak oil and are on the downward slope.

That’s not to say we’ll run out of oil. Canada has billions of barrells in its tar-sands, and the U.S. has over a trillion in shale rock. But getting oil out of tar sand or shale is energy intensive, expsneive, and hell on the environment (60 gallons of cruse for every TON of shale rock). The days of cheap oil are over, but maybe thats a good thing. America was an oil EXPORTER up until the 60’s. If we innovate and find ways to get oil out of shale more efficiently, we can become an exporter again, which would give us HUGE leverage over China.

But that’s not going to happen if we artificially manipulate gas prices just to keep American consumers happy.

@Cmdr:

And bio-fuel has not been proved to be any better for the environment in regards to CO2.  However, it has been shown to cause significantly more damage to the environment in other chemicals and compounds as well as being extremely unstable (which is why it has to be trucked, not piped like regular fuel.)

I have no idea on your claim of trucking.  Or the more damage part.  What would that be exactly?

And the price of oil is all speculation.  People “think” the market is bad because the media’s been telling us the market is “bad” for the past decade.  As soon as people realize they were lied too, oil prices (and gold and all the other commodities which are currently insanely too high in value to be supported) will plummet in a Commodity Bubble Burst.

Uh…you are blaming prices on the media?  Seriously? People complain about the price of oil, not the market, which is doing very well for itself.

Neither has, or should have, anything to do with politics.  Both have everything to do with the media conglomerates creating yellow journalism to bolster sales to increase profit just like they did during the Spanish American War and other times in World History.  Remember, the media is in the business of making the news!  If there is no news, there is no media!!!  (The same can be said about commentators, disc jockeys, clowns, etc.  All out to make a profit.)

Wow.  And how exactly does the media benefit from your conspiracy? And prices of food and oil have EVERYTHING to do with politics.

@Amon:

but, personally i see a link between the two issues( food and oil), and not just some marginal one.

In the US, food prices are increasing for a variety of reasons, but one of them is that hardly anyone eats locally.  As gas prices go up, so do the costs of shipping your food.

@Jermofoot:

@Cmdr:

And bio-fuel has not been proved to be any better for the environment in regards to CO2.  However, it has been shown to cause significantly more damage to the environment in other chemicals and compounds as well as being extremely unstable (which is why it has to be trucked, not piped like regular fuel.)

I have no idea on your claim of trucking.  Or the more damage part.  What would that be exactly?

And the price of oil is all speculation.  People “think” the market is bad because the media’s been telling us the market is “bad” for the past decade.  As soon as people realize they were lied too, oil prices (and gold and all the other commodities which are currently insanely too high in value to be supported) will plummet in a Commodity Bubble Burst.

Uh…you are blaming prices on the media?  Seriously? People complain about the price of oil, not the market, which is doing very well for itself.

Neither has, or should have, anything to do with politics.  Both have everything to do with the media conglomerates creating yellow journalism to bolster sales to increase profit just like they did during the Spanish American War and other times in World History.  Remember, the media is in the business of making the news!  If there is no news, there is no media!!!  (The same can be said about commentators, disc jockeys, clowns, etc.  All out to make a profit.)

Wow.  And how exactly does the media benefit from your conspiracy? And prices of food and oil have EVERYTHING to do with politics.

@Amon:

but, personally i see a link between the two issues( food and oil), and not just some marginal one.

In the US, food prices are increasing for a variety of reasons, but one of them is that hardly anyone eats locally.  As gas prices go up, so do the costs of shipping your food.

Jermo, I don’t think your chart takes into account the energy costs that go into creating/extracting biofuels/oils. The energy needed to grow and harvest an acre of corn for biofuel use is going to be much greater than the energy needed to extract a like number of barells of  crude. In some places in the Middle East, it literally bubbles to the surface.

That being said, we need to be develping technology that efficiently makes use of the lleftovers of crops (corn husks, etc.)

@Smacktard:

@Jermofoot:

@Cmdr:

And bio-fuel has not been proved to be any better for the environment in regards to CO2.  However, it has been shown to cause significantly more damage to the environment in other chemicals and compounds as well as being extremely unstable (which is why it has to be trucked, not piped like regular fuel.)

I have no idea on your claim of trucking.  Or the more damage part.  What would that be exactly?

And the price of oil is all speculation.  People “think” the market is bad because the media’s been telling us the market is “bad” for the past decade.  As soon as people realize they were lied too, oil prices (and gold and all the other commodities which are currently insanely too high in value to be supported) will plummet in a Commodity Bubble Burst.

Uh…you are blaming prices on the media?  Seriously? People complain about the price of oil, not the market, which is doing very well for itself.

Neither has, or should have, anything to do with politics.  Both have everything to do with the media conglomerates creating yellow journalism to bolster sales to increase profit just like they did during the Spanish American War and other times in World History.  Remember, the media is in the business of making the news!  If there is no news, there is no media!!!  (The same can be said about commentators, disc jockeys, clowns, etc.  All out to make a profit.)

Wow.  And how exactly does the media benefit from your conspiracy? And prices of food and oil have EVERYTHING to do with politics.

@Amon:

but, personally i see a link between the two issues( food and oil), and not just some marginal one.

In the US, food prices are increasing for a variety of reasons, but one of them is that hardly anyone eats locally.  As gas prices go up, so do the costs of shipping your food.

Jermo, I don’t think your chart takes into account the energy costs that go into creating/extracting biofuels/oils. The energy needed to grow and harvest an acre of corn for biofuel use is going to be much greater than the energy needed to extract a like number of barells of  crude. In some places in the Middle East, it literally bubbles to the surface.

That being said, we need to be develping technology that efficiently makes use of the lleftovers of crops (corn husks, etc.)

I know it does not take into account the growing of the material, the harvesting of the material, the shipping of the material, the processing of the material, the shipping of the refined material and the storage of the refined material.  That chart ONLY looks at the waste products of the material after it is burned.

Biofuels cannot be shipped in pipes.  It is highly unstable, that means you have to truck it.  Since you are using trucks to ship the material, you are creating MORE pollution.  The refinement process itself barely creates more energy producing the material than you get from the material.  The refinement process itself also produces large quantities of ozone and shoots a lot of vegetable matter particulates into the atmosphere.

All in all, biofuels are doing more to damage the world’s ecosystem than any other form of fuel.  In fact, it is doing more damage than atomic and nuclear weapons have done throughout history, and I include Chernobyl the nuclear plant that melted down in Russia.  (Scientists are amazed at how well nature recovered in these areas and how fast, filmatleven.)

Anyway, every point I’ve raised is common knowledge.  If you want to check on it, a cursory check should pull up the relevant data.  I recommend using real periodicals and not blogs.  DISCOVER Magazine is good, Popular Science as well, Consumer Reports just had a huge article on this as well in conjunction with the new mileage standards on hybrids and why their mileage ratings dropped between 10-30% into more realistic numbers. (The focus of that article was more on the damage caused to the environment by producing the batteries, but they also covered why pure ethanol gas stations and other biofuel stations are not found on every street corner.)

Try to avoid sites sponsored or supported by The Seirra Club.  It’s a propaganda machine and they have an agenda which is to scare us into buying into these off the wall ideas which they sell to the politicians who in turn send contracts their way to buy them.  In other words, they are in the business of environment “enhancement.”

That chart ONLY looks at the waste products of the material after it is burned.

Which is where the majority of pollution comes from.

Since you are using trucks to ship the material, you are creating MORE pollution.

Here you are telling us using trucks creates more pollution…. no kidding…  :roll: … Like that’s going to stop people from transporting any other kind of goods using trucks.

All in all, biofuels are doing more to damage the world’s ecosystem than any other form of fuel.  In fact, it is doing more damage than atomic and nuclear weapons have done throughout history, and I include Chernobyl the nuclear plant that melted down in Russia.  (Scientists are amazed at how well nature recovered in these areas and how fast, filmatleven.)

Go take a walk and have some lunch in Chernobyl then.

Anyway, every point I’ve raised is common knowledge.  If you want to check on it, a cursory check should pull up the relevant data.  I recommend using real periodicals and not blogs.  DISCOVER Magazine is good, Popular Science as well, Consumer Reports just had a huge article on this as well in conjunction with the new mileage standards on hybrids and why their mileage ratings dropped between 10-30% into more realistic numbers. (The focus of that article was more on the damage caused to the environment by producing the batteries, but they also covered why pure ethanol gas stations and other biofuel stations are not found on every street corner.)

Magazines…. isn’t that another medium of media? I thought you say the media lies. Or is it only the media that says something you may not like to hear?
Speaking of which, who needs the media when everyone in the streets is talking about the continuous soaring costs of food and gas. I haven’t watched the news in weeks. Don’t need to when I can see the numbers on the cash register with my own eyes.

Try to avoid sites sponsored or supported by The Seirra Club.  It’s a propaganda machine and they have an agenda which is to scare us into buying into these off the wall ideas which they sell to the politicians who in turn send contracts their way to buy them.  In other words, they are in the business of environment “enhancement.”

Probably a good idea to avoid buying into opinions on forums also. They have their own method of propaganda as well.  :wink:

HolKann, you paint a more believable picture

@stuka:

That chart ONLY looks at the waste products of the material after it is burned.

Which is where the majority of pollution comes from.

Not in the case of current biofuels. How much energy do you really think an oil derrick uses? But in the case of biofuels, there is a massive energy investment: preparing the soil, irrigation and maintenance of the crop, harvesting, and then turning the corn into something you can refine. For the time and energy needed to grow one acre of corn, that oil derrick is just pumping away, drawing thousands of barrels of oil out of the ground.

There’s no doubt that current biofuels are more pollutive, even if the fuel itself is LESS pollutive, because WE have to make the biofuels. In the case of oil, nature’s already done the dirty work for us, over millions of years. All we need to do is get it out of the ground, which is ridiculously easy to do in the Middle East.

Even though the current policy is a failure, theres a chance it might lead to an innovation in next-generation biofuels, which would extract oil from food crop leftovers.

In fact, it is doing more damage than atomic and nuclear weapons have done throughout history, and I include Chernobyl the nuclear plant that melted down in Russia.  (Scientists are amazed at how well nature recovered in these areas and how fast, filmatleven.)

:roll: Someone was hitting the Vodka when they typed that.

Consumer Reports just had a huge article on this as well in conjunction with the new mileage standards on hybrids and why their mileage ratings dropped between 10-30% into more realistic numbers. (The focus of that article was more on the damage caused to the environment by producing the batteries, but they also covered why pure ethanol gas stations and other biofuel stations are not found on every street corner.)

I have a subsription to CR and I didn’t see anything like this, nor would I expect to. CR is an indepedently run ratings agency for consumers. You go there to find out what kind of flat screen to buy or how sucky Kias still are, not whether biofuels are cost-effective or energy efficient.

Try to avoid sites sponsored or supported by The Seirra Club.  It’s a propaganda machine and they have an agenda which is to scare us into buying into these off the wall ideas which they sell to the politicians who in turn send contracts their way to buy them.  In other words, they are in the business of environment “enhancement.”

There are plenty of online reputable sources to make a point with. If you can’t find any, the point you’re making is probably no good.

Well I think the whole CO2-thing is overestimated. People are telling us how the weather will be like in 50 years, if we continue to burn fossile fuels. Those actually are the same people who tell us how the weather will be like in three days, and get it wrong every other day. So with the best and most modern methods available today it’s not really possible to generate a reliable weather forecast for one week. Period. They do have the best scientists and the hugest calculating power available over there in Japan for predicting the course of typhoons. 72 hours before it hits, they can only tell you it will be “somewhere between the Philippines and Taiwan”. The problem is that those calculations cannot be exact at the moment, because there are huge influences on weather and climate which we simply do not know or just start to understand.

It’s not that I say that it doesn’t matter if we release all the CO2 absorbed within millions of years within a very short period of time. It will have an effect, that’s for sure. But I say that we do not know what the effect will be. At the moment there is a trend towards warmer climate, but it is far from sure that the main cause for that is CO2-emissions. After all, it has been much warmer back in the middle ages, where the good Scottish (!) wine was famous and olives grew in southern Germany. The Vikings were choosing the names “Greenland” and “Vinland” (Labrador, “Wine-Land”) for a reason. And all that without CO2.

The rest comes down to costs. How much money is spent to prevent CO2-emissions - where the results are doubtful - and how much could be done to further other causes and where you would get good results for sure? And even if the CO2-emissions are the real big reason for global warming? How much would it cost to cut down CO2-emissions to prevent it, and how much would it cost to mitigate the negative effects of say +2° in climate. And don’t forget, that there would be huge benefits too. Millions of square kilometers additional arable land in Canada and Russia to feed the growing demands of a wealthier population? More freshwater available around the world? I do not know, if such calculations have ever been made, but I think it should be done before spending trillions in money and reduced standard of living with doubtful results.

As for the prices of oil and food:

Speculation can be an additional reason for the high prices but it’s not really the main problem. Most of the so-called “speculations” are futures traded by shipping companies, airlines, chemical plants and so on. The just want to make sure now they will get their fuel or oil later at a certain price so that they can calculate their costs and make their offers accordingly. Flights for the summer holidays are booked in late winter, and people want to know how much it costs. So the airline has to know the price then. Simple as that. And this kind of speculation has always been around, so it’s nothing new.

It seems the phenomenon of high oil prices will last. You have to fuel the huge worldwide economic growth in the last years somehow. And oil has not really gotten so expensive if you compare it to other commodities like copper, nickel, cobalt, tungsten, etc.

The problem with food is the low investment into agriculture during the last decades. Because the USA and Europe have always had a surplus of food, they even spent lots of money (in Europe, not so sure about USA) to reduce agricultural production to keep the prices high. Investment in agricultural sciences has been very low too, and many countries even banned some of the more promising venues. And since the surplus production of Europe and the USA was cheap to buy on the international markets, there have not been very huge incentives for other countries too to invest in their own agricultural sector. This incentives are here now, but it will take a year or two until the investments in the agricultural sector pay off.

So concerning food prices, this year they can well rise a bit more, but I think they will come down again in a year or two.

So all said here is purely speculative of course. I do not know much about world markets, just making up a few things with the limited information I have. Reading this post in a year or two will be fun, I think.

Another problem concerning food prices could be organic food.

Imagine an island with 1000 people and 100 “units” of arable land. With “conventional” agricultural methods, they they are producing enough food to feed the 1000 people on this area. Then, 30 % of the farmers switch to organic production, harvesting only 50 % of the amount before. Of course the organic food is more expensive, but there are rich people on the island, who pay for that. In effect you lose the production of 15 “units” of land, which means there is only food for 850 people total available. So also the price of the conventional food rises.

There are only three alternatives

• improve the “conventional” agricultural methods (introduce genetically modified agriculture for example) to raise production on the land available
• cut down forests to gain 15 units of arable land
• quit organic agriculture

@HolKann:

Err, do you guys get how biofuels work? The only pollution coming out of them is by producing them, not using them. If it would cost us nothing to produce, it would be the ultimate recoverable energy source (except for the “less room for food”-part). CO2 isn’t produced by burning biofuels. As it isn’t “produced” by burning fossile fuels. This seems counter-intuitive, but let me explain it:

-warning long post without summary, but I did my best to keep it readable-

An easy-to-use form of energy is fuels (either fossile or bio). These fuels are carbohydrates, connections of carbon and hydrogen (C and H). These are the connections, when burned with oxygen (O2), that supply us with energy, resulting in carbo-oxydes (dunnow the right English word) (like CO2) and hydro-oxydes (like water: H2O).

How did these fuels develop? Both fossile and bio developed the same way: Plants take CO2 from the air, H2O from the ground and energy from the sun’s light. They combine these elements to form the C and H connections we use. As you can see, the circle is round: CO2 is removed from air by growing plants, CO2 gets back to air by humanity burning plants. (Solar) Energy is captured by plants, energy is used by humanity. And as everyone knows, both fossile and biofuels are made of plants.

So burning both fossile and bio fuels is like putting CO2 back where it belongs: in the air, ready for new plants to grow. Why is burning fossile (bio: see later) fuels bad for our environment then? Because it has to do with the time-scale: all the CO2 in fossile fuels is gathered over millions of years, and didn’t get back in the atmosphere. The atmosphere found a balance of it’s own, not needing the CO2 from all these plants. Now we are burning all these plants (under the form of oil), and putting this incredible amount of CO2 back in the atmosphere, with global warming as a result. Which ofcourse is bad  :-(

Why is burning biofuels not bad (in theory)? Because it takes the CO2 we have in our atmosphere TODAY (as opposed to fossile fuels containing CO2 from millions of years ago) to grow these fuels. So all of the CO2 produced by burning biofuels, was removed from our atmosphere whilst growing biofuels. So the net gain of CO2 in our atmosphere by growing and burning biofuels is 0 seen on a timescale of a couple of months! It doesn’t matter how much CO2 biofuels produce when burned, because that’s also the amount they took from the atmosphere whilst being produced some months before. Which clearly is not bad  :-)

This is why some years ago governments started supporting biofuels: it is better for the environment when done right. Nowadays, problems have become clear: extra high food prices, burning of rainforests to make way for biofuelcrops, too much energy invested in growing the biofuelcrops, extra chemicals needed to grow the crops etc. Nonetheless, there are ways to make good use of biofuels bypassing most of these problems, so don’t give biofuels the bad name it doesn’t deserve. But as with all things, theory is only the first step towards reality…

@Smacktard:

There’s no doubt that current biofuels are more pollutive, even if the fuel itself is LESS pollutive, because WE have to make the biofuels. In the case of oil, nature’s already done the dirty work for us, over millions of years. All we need to do is get it out of the ground, which is ridiculously easy to do in the Middle East.

I’m sorry, but current biofuels are less pollutive (in terms of CO2) when done right (this is when grown in places with enough sun/water/…, where no forests needed to be burned down, and when the resulting fuels aren’t transported to the other end of the world. Unfortunately, these are also the ideal circumstances to grow food…).

That’s a good point, and, as a rule of thumb, we probably shouldn’t be massively releasing CO2 that’s been stored in the earth over millions of years, but…

Do you live near an agricultural area? I live about 45 miles from Bakersfield, CA. I can tell you that farming is very energy intensive, involving all sorts of exhuast spewing machines: Tractors, migrant farm workers riding around on ATV’s, planes (not all the time, but there still is crop dusting going on), harvesters, and whatever machines they use to turn corn into a refinable product. Not to mention all the chemicals that go into modern-day farming (Bakersfield has a rather peculiar smell, when the wind blows right). Even though the end product has a net CO2 value of zero, developing it is another story.

"THE RESULTS  Both studies found that changes in land use related to biofuel production would be a significant source of greenhouse gases in the future. Fargione reported that, overall, biofuels would cause higher total emissions for tens to hundreds of years. Some ecosystems had surprisingly high emissions—grasslands in the United States converted to corn farms would increase carbon dioxide for 93 years.

Searchinger’s outlook is bleaker: He estimates that the rise in corn-based ethanol production in the United States would increase greenhouse gases, relative to what our current, fossil-fuel-based economy produces, for 167 years.

THE MEANING  “Any biofuel that causes clearing of natural ecosystems is likely to increase global warming,” Fargione says. But not all bio­fuels are alike. For one, sugarcane ethanol, produced in Brazil, stands out to both researchers as the most efficient source studied, in terms of emissions. As long as there is land conversion, though, biofuels do not diminish carbon dioxide emissions. Biofuels made from sources that do not require land conversion, such as corn stover (the parts of corn plants left over after the ears are harvested), animal waste, damaged trees, algae, and food waste are promising alternatives.

STATS BEHIND THE STUDY
• Plants and soils contain almost three times as much carbon as the atmosphere.
• About 20 percent of total current carbon emissions comes from land-use change.
• In 2004, 74 million acres of U.S. land were devoted to corn for livestock feed as well as food crops. By 2016 about 43 percent of that area will be used to harvest corn for ethanol.
• 27 percent of new palm oil plantations in Indonesia are created on land that began as tropical rain forest; 1.5 percent of these lands are being deforested each year.
• In 2006 the United States produced 250 million gallons of biodiesel. Total production capacity is already 1.4 billion gallons a year and is expected to more than double with new plants and expansion of existing ones.
• 2006 ethanol capacity was 4.4 billion gallons, with an expected increase of 2.1 billion gallons with current construction and expansion projects.
• U.S. gasoline consumption is 389 million gallons per day, or about 142 billion gallons per year."

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/may/03-biofuel-farming-looks-to-be-an-environmental-disaster

And that study didn’t even go into the pollution of biofuel production- it was strictly based on land change-over.

http://www.ewg.org/factsheets/cornethanol

Just some info on how damaging to the environment corn is.

Just some info on how damaging to the environment corn is.

All vegetables are inherently evil. The only proven artifact to preserve our survival is meat because with meat eating you don’t get people who are trying to stop others from eating it. Eating meat creates an open mind,whereas eating a vegetable creates a vegetable mind that is angry because it has no flavor and its pissed off that other people are enjoying their lives full of flavor and having no care in the world about what died to feed them. And they shouldn’t.

People who are of the persuasion of the perceived environmental impact of having too many cows are just looking for an angle to cling on to in support of ancillary arguments dealing with “hurting” animals and they are grabbing at straws and voodoo. Its primarily a psychological study to understand that what you are denying yourself is EXACTLY the same thing as what you want to deny in others so as to make your guilt of denial go down easier.

But thats the vegans problem.

• improve organic agriculture

Yeah, well, that has been done for 5000 years now, so there is no real possibility to further enhance the mediocre harvests (when compared to “conventional” agriculture) of organic farming.

• eat less meat

Nice slogan, but not really an option, as lots of people just WANT to eat meat (me included). Systems and ideas that don’t work because “the people don’t get it right” are bad systems and ideas. Those things have to work with the people that are around, else they are useless systems and ideas.

No, a bit wrong, in Europe it’s the other way around. After the war, Europe’s countries decided they should be self-sufficient, they didn’t want to rely on foreign policies for their most basic need: food. That’s why the governments started sponsoring agriculture, leading to the cheap surplus they have today. It’s not investing to keep the prices high, but investing to keep the prices low. Hell, they even exported to Africa, and the prices of European food were lower there than the price of food produced by the local farmer, who as a result couldn’t climb out of the pit colonialism had left because he couldn’t sell his food to his subsaharan palls. Shuck, now I’ve really dragged everything into this. Just note that Europe should stop sponsoring it’s agriculture (especially France, ces imbécils!).

The conclusion (stop to sponsor agriculture) is right, although for different reasons, which go too far into politics, and I don’t want to get this thread closed. The rest is almost totally wrong. After the war there have been sponsorings for increasing agricultural production, and after ca. 1970 there has been a vast overproduction. Since 1992 it has been obligatory for farmers not to use a certain amount of their arable land in order to recieve direct payments from the European Union. So effectively the EU was using tax money to pay farmers not to produce. And that continued until the end of 2007, as can be read here:

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/07/1402&format=HTML&aged=1&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

So according to this press release (26/09/2007):

The current area under obligatory set-aside amounts to 3.8 million hectares in the EU. If the set-aside rate was set to 0 %, the effective return of land could be between 1.6 and 2.9 million hectares. Considering average trends, it is likely to bring around 10 million tonnes of grains onto the market.

So it seems there could be a massive boost in the amount harvested this year, which will take some pressure off the market for agricultural goods, but it will take some time until you can harvest that extra amount.

@Smacktard:

Jermo, I don’t think your chart takes into account the energy costs that go into creating/extracting biofuels/oils. The energy needed to grow and harvest an acre of corn for biofuel use is going to be much greater than the energy needed to extract a like number of barells of  crude. In some places in the Middle East, it literally bubbles to the surface.

That being said, we need to be develping technology that efficiently makes use of the lleftovers of crops (corn husks, etc.)

It assumes the biofuel originates in the country it is burned and that the land did not need to be converted to farmland before planting a biofuel crop.  Otherwise, it may exceed oil, but oil is also subject to extraction, refining, shipping (!), etc.  Furthermore, you must include that growing a biofuel crop also offsets itself in emissions by natural plant respiration which oil does not do.