There's a type of polling known as "push polling," and at its rawest form a question on such a survey might go something like this: "Jim Nelson is running for town council. If you knew that he carried a picture of Osama Bin Laden in his wallet, gave parenting lessons to Britney Spears and may have had something to do with that really ugly divorce over on Cherry Street that you may have heard about, would you vote for him?" Safe to say, it wouldn't be Jim Nelson's campaign paying for that poll.
We don't know if the questions were quite so stark when the nation's ethanol makers squared off against the makers of Spam recently, but one can only imagine.
Almost as if the two of them timed it, both the Renewable Fuels Association, which is the primary arm of the US ethanol industry, and Hormel, the food processing and packing company, issued results of surveys that they conducted in recent months. They both surveyed US citizens, they both focused in part on the same question -- whether growing ethanol use has increased food prices -- and not surprisingly, they both came to different conclusions, just days apart.
What they didn't both do was ask the same question the same way.
For example, the RFA appears to have given its respondents a list of potential reasons for the rising cost of food. Respondents to the RFA survey were presented with several options when asked what was the cause of higher food prices, and asked to rank them. Higher oil prices, increased global demand for food "from nations like China," poor weather, and "food companies raising prices to increase profits" all came out ahead of "increased ethanol production" as the reason for the hike in food prices.
Over at Hormel, the question on ethanol was just one in an entire survey about hunger. In the survey, about two thirds of the respondents said there is a rising hunger problem in the US, and that the primary reason for it were "rising food and fuel costs" and a "worsening economy." Those answers accounted for 63% of the respondents.
The Hormel survey was remarkably frank in noting that it raised the suggestion of an ethanol-food price link, a fact that the RFA jumped on with glee in its own release. "When prompted, (60% of) Americans make a connection between the shift to increased use of ethanol as a fuel and higher food prices," according to Hormel. It also conceded that about half the respondents say subsidies for ethanol will help reduce fuel dependence, but 47% oppose the subsidies because of the possibility of higher food prices.
Regardless of what you believe, this whole debate is not good for the ethanol industry. It's almost sort of stunning just how fast the RFA and ethanol supporters find themselves swatting away the allegations that they are responsible for higher food prices, even as they claim responsibility for being one of the reasons why gasoline prices have not gone up as fast as crude prices.
Criticism of ethanol always had focused on it being a government boondoggle, being bad for the environment, and so on. The possibility that it might increase food prices occasionally was heard, but never to the extent that it is being heard now. It is probably the industry's biggest threat to the reservoir of goodwill it long had in the US, and it's shocking to see the growing acceptance of the formula "ethanol = higher food prices." It's hard to see it going away anytime soon, no matter what the RFA says in a survey.
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