Could biofuels be our savior after all? This from Bloomberg:

Biofuels can boost incomes and yields for farmers, revitalizing impoverished rural areas when they are introduced in countries with secure land ownership, the International Institute for Environment and Development said.

By raising the price of crops such as corn and palm oil, biofuels can reduce poverty in countries with a high dependency on agriculture, the London-based researcher said in a report with the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

The sulfuric-acid market is booming and oil companies are reaping the rewards.

According to the London Times, the price of sulfur has risen from $50 to $500 a ton in under a year. More from this report:

“Shell is one of the most-efficient producers of sulphur,” Barry Clarke, a sulphur market analyst for Pentasul, said.

Food price inflation is set to continue, according to a recently released UN report on food prices. This from CNN:

World food prices will fall from current peaks in the coming years but will remain “substantially above” average levels from the past decade.

The world’s poorest nations are most vulnerable — particularly the urban poor in food-importing countries — and will require increased humanitarian aid to stave off hunger and undernourishment, a joint agricultural outlook by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said.

Inflation is global and it has prompted French president Nicolas Sarkozy to seek a cap on sales taxes on fuel products if oil prices continue to rise. This from Thomson Reuters:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Tuesday the European Union should consider capping sales taxes on fuel products if oil prices rose further but his proposal got short shrift from Brussels.

As crude oil prices smash the $135-a-barrel barrier for the first time, Taiwan, Malaysia and Indonesia say they will take action to protect their state-owned oil companies.

“If oil prices keep going up, it is simply not in any country’s best interest to keep subsidizing these prices indefinitely,” says Peter Gastreich, a UBS oil and gas analyst, in the Financial Times.

A US government home-price index has posted the sharpest decline in its 17-year history – and analysts say things won’t get better until at least 2009.

Home prices fell 3.1% in the first quarter compared with last year, according to The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight. This from AP:

Declines in the government index, which focuses on less expensive properties and includes fewer houses bought with risky home loans that have gone sour over the past year, show the depth of the housing market’s troubles.

The rising US inflation rate is dampening policy makers’ appetite for more Fed rate cuts, even if the economy sinks into a recession, according to recently released minutes of its last policy meeting. This from MarketWatch:

Surging prices for gasoline, food and other commodities forced the Fed to sharply boost its inflation outlook for this year, but not for next year. At the same time, their forecast for economic growth this year was revised much lower this year, with a rebound next year still in the cards.

The core US inflation rate or Producer Price Index (PPI) — a measure of the prices of goods excluding food and energy  — rose 0.4% in April, double the increase forecast by economists.

This puts the core US inflation rate up 3% in the past year, the biggest year-over-year rise since late 1991.

The PPI figures are unlikely to affect the markets which, according to a report by MarketWatch, “don’t seem to trust the government’s inflation figures that show falling energy prices in a world of record crude oil prices.”

Sulfuric acid (or sulphuric acid, if you’re a Brit) may not be grabbing headlines, but as the spot price of this industrial chemical surges, some interesting investment plays open up.

Sulfuric acid is used in mining to extract copper, nickel and uranium. It is also used in steel manufacturing, fertilizer production and oil refining.

“What’s really kicked off demand for this chemical, however,” according to Chris Mayer in The Daily Reckoning, “is the surge in ethanol production — a double whammy for sulfuric acid.

Scaring the false capitalists…Valuing the real capitalists.