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Boerboom met with about 25 business people invited by the Winona Area Chamber of Commerce to a lunch at Jefferson’s Pub & Grill. Much of the speech focused on ethanol’s impacts to food and fuel prices.
Boerboom said Americans are paying more for food and gas and they’re not sure why. Some critics of ethanol, a fuel additive made mostly from corn, blame it for contributing to rising costs. But larger causes are an increase in global demand for fuel, primarily from China and India, a decline in agricultural production worldwide, record high U.S. exports, speculative investors driving up fuel prices and the falling value of the U.S. dollar in other markets, Boerboom said.
“Ethanol is not a perfect fuel, but it’s better than gasoline,” Boerboom’s communications director Michael Schommer said in an interview after the meeting. “It’s not a gasoline replacement; it’s an additive to meet environmental standards.”
Agriculture, including ethanol production, is a booming industry in Minnesota. More than 376,000 jobs are directly linked to agriculture, and Minnesota is seventh in the nation on exporting agricultural goods to other countries, Boerboom said.
Investors are jumping to commodities — with a more than $200 million jump in dollars invested in the past five years — because the housing market is suffering, he said.
A diverse group of grocers, farmers, manufacturers and bankers seemed to find common ground in Boerboom’s comments.
“I wasn’t sure how it would go, as the RSVP list grew,” said Della Schmidt, chamber president. “I didn’t know how the organic farmers would react to the people from MinnErgy (an ethanol company).”
Schmidt said most business people at the speech agreed with Boerboom and that consumers have a difficult time understanding the current economic climate.
“There is an underlying current in the trenches,” Schmidt said. “We get it, we understand and we’re trying to help the consumer understand.”
