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If you're using first-class land for biofuels, then you're competing with the growing of food. And so you're actually spiking food prices by moving energy production into agriculture.

Because of the low photosynthetic efficiency and the competition of energy plants with food plants for agricultural land, we should not grow plants for biofuel production. The growth of such energy plants will undoubtedly lead to an increase in food prices, which will predominantly hit poorer people.

Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.

The most interesting biofuel efforts avoid using land that's expensive and has high opportunity costs. They do this by getting onto other types of land, or taking advantage of byproducts that aren't used in the food chain today, or by intercropping.

Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.

You've got a global food problem. You've got a food problem in the United States. You've got a food problem in Africa... in Asia. And so the truth is, the U.S. is going to have to produce more, on not very many more acres, honestly. And so we're going to have to do a better job.

To affordably feed the next billion people, we must have higher-yielding crops with even greater nutritional value. America should be at the vanguard of the innovative advances that will make this happen.

Certain food-based biofuels like biodiesel have always been a bad idea. Others like corn ethanol have served a useful purpose and essentially are obsoleting themselves.

We are doing everything we can to protect the food supply. And I can tell you that we're making decisions based upon sound science and good public policy, given the circumstances that we are now in.

We are already producing enough food to feed the world. We already have technology in place that allows us to produce more than we can find a market for.