[ravenstine]

> With the increase in demand for corn for fuel usage, more fields are needed to plant the corn. Because the corn is for fuel, not food, food wouldn't have been planted in place of the corn had there not been fuel demand.

Spent corn used in ethanol production becomes livestock feed. Good quality feed, actually. Even with a surplus of spent corn, it can be dried and kept around until needed. Point being that it actually is food, just by proxy. More fields may be needed to scale for demand, but it wouldn't be linear. For all we know, the scale of corn production has a modest relationship with ethanol or is correlative and weakly causative.