China, GM, Ethanol, over population?

[RodISHI]

I was curious so I did some quick searches on China. It seemed not to many years ago China was having a really tough time feeding all the people there.

I came across this article that GM, "will continue to increase investment despite the troubled U.S. auto giant General Motors amid financial crisis, peplenet.com said today, citing SAIC vice president and Shanghai GM general manager Ding Lei".

I read more on these articles of Huliq News and discovered, "GM says biofuels suit China transportation."

The end of the ethanol article says, "The Chinese fuel ethanol market is expected to double in the next few years, despite looming obstacles like the availability of adequate feed-stocks."

It leaves me asking a few questions.

Is GM and Chrysler sending money to China and then expecting American funds so the people of America can foot the bill?

How does this play when America is already supposedly so far in debt to China?

If China has historically had so many problems feeding their people why are they going to ethanol with viable crop lands?

I have read that Verasun is the largest ethanol company in the world and they just filed bankruptcy. Wells Fargo cut a deal and jumped into the number two creditor position in the bankruptcy case. Which in turn left the farmers and the grain companies holding the worst position in the Verasun bankruptcy case.


Is the price of steak going down in the grocery store since the grain market just went to poop?

 

[waltky]

Dey told us dis was gonna happen, an' now poor peoples gonna get screwed whilst dem food megopolies make a whole buncha money...

Ethanol pumping up food prices
10 Feb.`11 - Combination of natural calamities and congressional mandates blamed

Get ready for higher food prices, which appear to be just around the corner for U.S. consumers and potentially a crippling burden for the world's poor. A combination of natural calamities and congressional mandates has come together to drive world food prices to levels that make some governments in developing nations nervous, because higher costs can mean political instability. The toll on American grocery carts thus far is low, but analysts say price increases are coming.

The immediate causes of the rise are clear: bad harvests due to drought in Russia, China and Argentina and floods in Australia, among other things. But a longer-term cause may come as a surprise:— 24% of the U.S. corn crop is now mandated to go to ethanol, taking slack out of the world food market and making price shocks more likely, agricultural economists say.

Add lower-than-expected corn yields last year and, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture figures out Wednesday, U.S. reserves of field corn are at their lowest levels in 15 years. The demand for corn for ethanol is now at 4.9 billion bushels per year. Corn prices have almost doubled, from $3.49 a bushel in July to $6.10 in January. Corn futures, contracts to buy corn at a given price in the future, as of Wednesday were $6.90 a bushel.

"We're going to be going into next year's harvest with really no surplus inventory at all, so the size of next year's crop becomes critical," says Darrel Good, an agricultural economist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

A threat to the poor

 

[uscitizen]

China exports food to the USA now.

 

[KissMy]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFOYoRSCT30&feature=related"]When you wipe-out 40,000 California farms then expect people to starve!!![/ame]