Italians Face Tough Call: Pasta or Biofuels?
by Jeremy Elton Jacquot, Los Angeles on 07.10.07
Biofuel enthusiasts in Italy may have just seen their hopes falter a bit: facing the prospect of mounting durum wheat prices, many pasta lovers in the country will undoubtedly wonder whether it's worth trading in their staple food for more wheat-based ethanol. Italian manufacturers have warned that the price of pasta, whose main ingredient is durum wheat, will likely shoot up by about 20% in the fall due to the increasing use of the grains in biofuels.
Although Italy remains one of the world's main producers of durum wheat (its expertise in selecting and blending grains for pasta making is still unrivaled), strong domestic demand and a flourishing export market have forced pasta manufacturers to import more from abroad (close to 40%), primarily from Canada and Syria. According to Mario Rummo, the president of the Italian pasta manufacturers association, however, Canada has just announced that it won't have any more wheat for sale until at least November. Syria, on the other hand, has just placed a ban on the export of wheat.
Analysts predict a price hike of close to 20% for spaghetti and fettuccine by the fall, a heavy blow for consumers long used to purchasing cheap pasta. Many have blamed global warming concerns for the shift in wheat sales from domestic food markets to the renewable energy industry. This has directly contributed to a sharp increase in the wholesale prices of the grain.
This price effect is likely to spill over in other large pasta consuming nations (say the U.S.) in the near future as supplies continue to dwindle. The worst imaginable scenario, of course, remains the drastic consequences increases in similar food crop prices (especially corn) could pose for developing countries in Africa and Asia, including mass poverty, hunger and starvation.
Via ::BBC News: Italians facing pasta price rise (news website)
See also: ::Don't Bet on Biofuels, ::The Big, the Bad and the Biofuels, ::Ethanol Plant Makes Vodka on the Side
Can't we find a more suitable biofuel feedstock than food? Food plants have been designed over the centuries to provide nutrition, not heat.
Exactly - we have all the heat and cooling we need from right under our feet - geothermal energy. Check out my geothermal blog for more.... geothermalpower.blogspot.com
Its only commonsense if we just recycled all of our garbage think of all the energy and fuel we would save millions of barrels of oil and I would not know or even guess how much electricity we would save. Think of the money we would save alone. Billions of dollars.
I've been reading about a lot of other things being brown to do this that we don't use for food, at least not that much. mushrooms, seaweed, sugar beets (who really eats those). her is an idea, how about. heck how about Kudza. that crap can grow a foot a day!
I agree, we should find a more suitable biofuel feedstock than food ...
But, well, drum wheat is at ridiculously low prices... farmers keep growing it only because it's subsidized ...
So a price increase - even +20% - won't be that dramatic, i bet 99% people won't even realize that ... a 20% increase in the final price would mean from 50 to 60cents on the most popular brand ... that would mean i guess an average of 3€ to spend more each month for a regular 4 person family that eats a lot of pasta ... i guess nobody is going to complain after all.
Journalist as usual love to make a big fuss out of nothing, especially in summer when they've nothing interesting to write.
Maybe if we biked or used the bus we wouldn't need so much ethanol ...
it's burnin topsoil