Food versus ethanol: A new range war?

"The farmer and the cowboy should be friends," Oscar Hammerstein wrote in his lyrics for the seminal musical "Oklahoma." It's a reference to the range wars on the American frontier which pitted cattlemen and their free-grazing herds against newly arriving farmers who were fencing in the land.

A new range war seems to be brewing in the Midwest and across the US, pitting corn growers against virtually the entire food industry, including the beef, chicken and egg, turkey and pork producers, feed companies, grocery manufacturers, cereal makers and, don't mess with these people, Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola.

The issue, of course, is the rising price of corn and corn-related products. The price of corn has jumped 55% since September, according to Senator James Inhofe, Republican-Oklahoma, as demand grows to provide feedstock for increased ethanol production.

"We believe in the need to advance renewable and alternative sources of energy," 18 industry associations wrote Inhofe. However, "We are concerned that the very aggressive increase in biofuels mandates raises fundamental questions about the impact that an increased federal government mandate for corn-based ethanol, in addition to new state mandates, will have on the livestock, poultry and food industry's ability to produce competitively available, affordable food."

Senator Charles Grassley, Republican-Iowa, the leading corn producing state, choosing to ignore the letter's endorsement of renewable fuel, said on the Senate floor last week: "Something that bothers me more than anything else [is that] we have always had agriculture very much united" on renewable fuels. "Everything about ethanol has been considered good, good, good."

"If we had had this attitude expressed 20 years ago when we started [and] if agriculture is not going to be united, if they had not been united, we would have never gotten here," Grassley said. "I do not know what happens in a matter of four or five months that, after 20 years, all of a sudden things are bad about renewable fuels and the farmer is being blamed for everything."

In the end, of course, regardless of who or what is responsible, the consumer pays. According to Bureau of Labor statistics cited in the Washington Post, from April 2006 to April 2007, the cost of beef increased 4.7%; poultry, 4.6%; milk, 3.2%; and eggs, 18.6%.

Let them eat cake? Up 3.7%.