Ethanol

What I was worried about was if we started using our food crops for fuel, then what happens if the demand becomes too much and we don't have enough crops for human consumption?

Yes, the use of food crops is serving to drive up the cost of food now. This is not a good thing-it certainly isn't helping us manage to cope with our current tight budgets.

Its all political, to make it seem like something good is being done.

The use of food crops, especially corn, has driven the costs up in this country as well as reducing the amount we send to other countries. This is contributing to the food shortages in other nations, inducing ration lines and even rioting in places. For land that is sitting fallow, producing corn for ethanol is great but there are many farmers who have switched over to producing corn for ethanol as it pays them better than food grade corn.

This wouldn't be such a problem if the government allowed farmers to open up other lands for farming, instead of maintaining the government imposed limitations. Ultimately I just don't think this is sustainable.

Its not just about opening up more land. Its about the land being used currently switching to fuel corn because of the higher premium than other crops with premiums. The US has for many years paid farmers premiums to produce certain crops to help farms from going under, because someone has to grow crops instead of selling to developers and shopping malls. While there is probably other places they could farm, just making more farm land will not help and it won' account for what that land was being used for either.

What I meant is that there are also farmers who are paid to NOT plant crops. So that the markets are not saturated, over supply presumably.

Anyway those bans could be lifted. And as someone else already said, there are ways around it-growing corn when the field would be out of use. The trouble here is that the land would rapidly become exhausted and infertile, if not for the heavy use of fertilisers.