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Iowa is big, fat corn country, and the farm boys and girls don't want anyone to mess with a good thing. That's why so many of them have swung behind Donald Trump. Unlike Hillary Clinton, his rival for the White House, The Donald is a fan of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), the U.S. government moonshine machine that has turned the Midwest into the OPEC of corn-based ethanol.

The standard was born in 2005 to help accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels and from imported oil. Since then, biofuels—mostly derived from corn-based ethanol—have gone from a trickle to a flood. In the United States, they now make up about 10% of every gallon of gasoline sold (it's about 5% in Canada). Each year, the RFS raises the amount of biofuels it wants blended with fossil fuels. In 2016, the total was 18.1 billion gallons, about 14.5 billion from ethanol. No wonder the farmers are smiling. The fuel is heavily subsidized by taxpayers, and swaths of farmland the size of small countries are being turned over to corn.

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The ethanol mob has won an almost total victory. Not only have the farmers, refiners and blenders established a vast industry in a remarkably short period of time, they claim to have defused the food-for-fuel controversy because food prices are now falling even as ethanol production expands.

The trouble is that their argument is bogus. The ethanol juggernaut keeps food prices higher than they should be, and there is ample evidence that its touted environmental benefit—reduced carbon dioxide emissions—is bogus, too.

During the global food crisis of 2007 and 2008, corn-based ethanol took some of the blame for raising food commodity prices and triggering food riots in dozens of countries. Every extra acre of corn grown for ethanol meant one less acre of wheat, soybeans or other edible crops. Jean Ziegler, then the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, called biofuels a "crime against humanity."

As ethanol production soared, so did corn prices. Corn peaked at about $8.50 (all currency in U.S. dollars) a bushel in 2012, sending the anti-ethanol crowd into a we-told-you-so tizzy. Ethanol now eats up 40% of the U.S. corn crop.

But the price of corn has fallen since the food crisis, hitting $3.15 a bushel in August. Overall food prices are lower, too. Since the 2011 peak, the United Nations' food price index is down 28% (although it has climbed over the past year). The Renewable Fuels Association, a powerful lobby group, says "there is no meaningful relationship between growth in  biofuel production and food security or food prices."

Not so fast. Corn prices have been falling because higher yields, good weather and massive acreages devoted to corn have led to record production. But weather is never dependable, and droughts or floods often wreck the yield party. When that happens, corn prices probably would climb sharply, as they did during the 2012 North American drought. Prices for other food commodities might follow. One problem with the RFS is that it is inflexible. Its production mandates remain in place even if overall corn production falls, which can amplify price volatility throughout the agricultural market.

A June, 2016, study by Daniel De La Torre Ugarte, professor of agriculture and resource economics at the University of Tennessee, demolishes the ethanol industry's claim that corn-based ethanol—and lots of it—has had benign effects on food prices. His model compares the corn market to what it would have been if the RFS and a related tax credit for ethanol blenders didn't exist.

De La Torre Ugarte concluded that the number of acres planted with corn would have fallen by as much as 15% and that corn prices would have been 33% to 41% lower, because demand would have declined faster than supply. If the reduced corn plantings were replaced with wheat and soybeans, the prices for the latter two commodities would have fallen by about 10%, because of their increased supply. The corn, wheat and soybean price reductions would have saved consumers about $10  billion a year. True, farm income would have fallen by a larger total. But agriculture is responsible for only about 1% of  U.S. jobs, so you might conclude that lower food prices would be much more beneficial to society than high farm income.

There would also be environmental benefits. The study concluded that carbon emissions from agriculture would be 13% lower if the RFS did not exist. That's because wheat and soybeans pull more carbon from the air than corn.

Corn-based ethanol was supposed to help wean the United States off foreign oil; the U.S. shale oil revolution did that. It was supposed to lower carbon emissions; if De La Torre Ugarte is right, the opposite has happened. And it was not supposed to lift food prices; it has. The only beneficiaries, it appears, are farmers and ethanol blenders. Donald Trump wants to ensure their gravy train doesn't stop running.

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