Cap and Tax will Raise Food Prices... Plan to turn farms into forest worries Obama official, that's the Secretary of Agriculture.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has ordered his staff to revise a computerized forecasting model that showed that climate legislation supported by President Obama would make planting trees more lucrative than producing food.

The latest Agriculture Department economic-impact study of the climate bill, which passed the House this summer, found that the legislation would profit farmers in the long term. But those profits would come mostly from higher crop prices as a result of the legislation's incentives to plant more forests and thus reduce the amount of land devoted to food-producing agriculture.

According to the economic model used by the department and the Environmental Protection Agency, the legislation would give landowners incentives to convert up to 59 million acres of farmland into forests over the next 40 years. The reason: Trees clean the air of heat-trapping gases better than farming does.

So, with food producing land taken out of production, permanently, food prices are bound to rise. You don't think that the economics will drive this?

Allison Specht, an economist at the American Farm Bureau Federation, said other studies have largely confirmed the results of the EPA and Agriculture Department analysis.

"That's one of the realities of cap-and-trade legislation. The biggest bang for your buck for carbon credits is planting trees," she said.

We don't EAT trees. Neither does anyone else in the world. First there was the ethanol fraud that has driven up corn prices while doing nothing to reduce gasoline consumption (my vehicle uses enough more fuel with 10% ethanol that it obliterates gas or dollar savings) which has driven up food prices for those dependent on corn. Now we'll take wheat and soybeans out of the market as well.

Labels: GlobalClimateChange

  ¶ posted by Hobie 8:00 AM