Another biofuel casualty — candy

With respect to the candy, I’m not sure, actually, whether the following is good news or bad from a dietary standpoint:

First it was tortillas in Mexico, then it was Frosted Flakes in America and recently German beer (more…). Now the latest food to become the victim of prices pushed up by the massive shift of crops to biofuel are Germany’s beloved gummy bears.

Prices of glucose, the second main ingredient in the chewy candies after sugar, rose by 30 percent in 2006.

“We’re going to maintain current prices through the end of the year,” Marco Alfter, a spokesman for Bonn-based gummy bear-maker Haribo, told SPIEGEL. But afterwards, the golden bears could get more expensive.

Haribo is one of a number of companies in the German food and beverage industry that has been critical of shifts in crops away from foodstuffs in order to accommodate production of biofuels, which emit less CO2 than regular gasoline and reduce dependency on energy sources in volatile regions. Representatives of mills, major bakeries, sweets companies and animal feed companies in Germany have joined forces to create the “Netzwerk Lebensmittel-Forum” (“Food Forum Network”), which is seeking to raise awareness about the dangers associated with replacing food agriculture with crops for biofuels (more…).

“In two to four years, we could be faced with substantial problems when it comes to feeding the population,” warned Karl-Heinz Legendre of the margarine industry association. Prices for palm and canola oil, wheat and corn have already risen dramatically.

As for every other food mentioned in that article other than candy, it’s manifestly a big problem that, based on the increasingly shaky evidence of man-made global warming, we’re destroying our food crops.