Today in Biofuels Opinion: “The “Food Before Fuel Campaign” will launch its national outreach effort today

From the Times-Record: “There was a time when Myanmar — then Burma — was the largest rice-exporting country in the world. But leader Than Schwe ordered rice crops torn out of paddies in order to plant jatropha. Myanmar citizens told of being ordered to plant the crop in their yards and along roads in order to grow what Schwe thought would be a cash cow in a world of tight oil supplies.
What he didn’t do was create the infrastructure — pipelines and processing plants — to convert the plants into fuel. Growers found themselves eliminating their rice paddies in order to grow a crop that even their own government refused to buy.”

From CBS News: “The “Food Before Fuel Campaign” will launch its national outreach effort at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on Thursday. The rollout has been organized by a broad coalition of agriculture interests and the Grocery Manufacturers Association. “The main goal of the coalition is to get Congress to freeze/roll back food to fuel ethanol mandates” and convince the Massachusetts attorney general to petition the Environmental Protection Agency “for relief from ethanol mandates,” according to an e-mail circulated by public relations firm organizing this effort. So while oil execs are explaining their healthy profits as the result of rising prices at the pump, this new coalition will be waging its campaign to make sure subsidized ethanol is not among the ways to reduce them.”

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