Officials from the United States Department of Agriculture are concerned about the ties between food and fuel costs. There’s no denying that as gasoline prices have risen, the cost of transporting food has also risen, driving up the cost of food. Also tied in are the costs of fertilizer, which also rely on the cost of petroleum (and are up 67 percent this year alone).

The USDA focuses on maintaining stable food prices, as well as access to fuel. Because of this mission, Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer, is encouraging the further development of biofuels in an attempt to bring down overall prices. In a press conference on Monday, he admitted that using corn and soybeans have brought food prices up, but justified it: “It's true that higher demand for corn for ethanol and soybeans for biodiesel has led to higher prices for those crops over the past couple of years. But we do not have a one on one relationship between higher prices for those commodities and what consumers are paying for foods at the retail level.”

Schafer, along with the USDA’s chief economist, Dr. Joe Glauber, also ran through some numbers that indicate that only a fraction of the overall increase in food prices is directly attributable to the use of corn and other agriculture products for biofuel, and that the benefit of lowering the cost of fuel outweighs that small percentage of the food price at stake.

I don’t necessarily feel that the USDA’s numbers take all factors into account — for instance, both corn and soybeans are used for animal feed, and higher costs for both indirectly push up the cost of meat — but both Shafer and Glauber make a good case for increasing biofuel production.

Image — The USDA