Is Democrat 'alternative energy' killing the catfish business?

NY Times:

The catfish industry is in free fall, unable to cope with the soaring cost of corn and soybean feed. Producers across the South are draining their ponds and wondering what comes next.

“It’s a dead business,” said John Dillard, who pioneered the commercial farming of catfish in the late 1960s. Last year Dillard & Company raised 11 million fish. Next year it will raise none. People can eat imported fish, Mr. Dillard said, just as they use imported oil.

As for his 55 employees? “Those jobs are gone.”

Corn and soybeans have nearly tripled in price in the last two years, for many reasons: harvest shortfalls, increasing demand by the Asian middle class, government mandates for corn to produce ethanol and, most recently, the flooding in the Midwest.

This is creating a bonanza for corn and soybean farmers but is wreaking havoc on consumers, who are seeing price spikes in the grocery store and in restaurants. Hog and chicken producers as well as cattle ranchers, all of whom depend on grain for feed, are being severely squeezed.

Perhaps nowhere has the rise in crop prices caused more convulsions than in the Mississippi Delta, the hub of the nation’s catfish industry. This is a hard-luck, poverty-plagued region, and raising catfish in artificial ponds was one of the few mainstays.

Then the economics went awry. Feed is now more than half the total cost of raising catfish, compared with a third of the cost of beef and pork production, according to a Mississippi State analysis. That makes catfish more vulnerable. But if the commodities continue to rocket up — and some analysts believe they will — other industries will fall victim as well.

Keith King, the president of Dillard & Company, calculates that for every dollar the company spends raising its fish, it gets back only 75 cents when they go to market.

“What’s happening to this industry is sad, but being sentimental won’t pay the light bill,” Mr. King said.

Dillard and other growers take their fish, still squirming, to Consolidated Catfish Producers in the hamlet of Isola, where workers run the machinery that slices them into filets. With fewer fish coming in, Consolidated Catfish is resorting to layoffs.

One hundred employees were let go in the last month, and an additional 200 will be cut soon. President Dick Stevens predicts that by the end of the year the company will have jobs for only 450, about half the number at its peak. That might not be enough to keep the plant open.

“The industry is going to implode,” Mr. Stevens said. He blamed the government’s ethanol mandates for making fuel compete with food for the harvest of the nation’s farmland. “Politicians were in a rush to do something, and it became a terrible snowball.”

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While some Republicans also supported the ethanol mandates it is the Democrats six strangling of all energy supplies that is exacerbating the problem. If the Democrats were not so committed to not permitting domestic drilling and exploiting shale oil and coal and nuclear energy, there would not be so much pressure to use corn for fuel.

They have stubbornly refused to see the problem they have created instead they are going on a witch hunt for speculators. President Bush did drive down the cost of oil this week with his announcement that he was removing the restrictions on offshore drilling. That should put even more political pressure on Democrats to drop their irrational restrictions on drilling.

The biggest beneficiary of their irrational restrictions is OPEC and other oil producing countries.

As a conservative I am tempted to hope they stay stuck on stupid on the energy issue, but as a patriotic American I hope they come to their senses and quit causing the transfer of our wealth to those who do not have our interest at heart.