Years ago I posted about industrial hemp being a better source for many things.@Will L., you obviously have never lived in farm country. Out of all the corn grown in America, very little of it percentage-wise is grown for human consumption - the "sweet" corn you eat off the ear, find in a can of Niblets, pop in your popper/microwave or grind up to make cornbread or cornchips. The vast majority of corn grown is "feed corn" - designed to feed livestock, cattle and hogs mainly - and is essentially inedible by humans as they are large kernels dried rock hard and the chemical composition makes them hard for humans to digest. This is the corn kernels used to make ethanol with. Ethanol production does NOT contribute one bit to the "starving people in Africa". The third kind of corn grown, a very small percentage of the total grown, is Seed Corn - which are hybrids specifically grown to provide the seed to plant for next year's crop of Feed Corn and Sweet Corn.
Corn is on its way out as a source stock for ethanol production due to the advent of cellulosic ethanol production that allows the use of any plant material - leaves, stems, stalks, branches, limbs - to produce ethanol by using an enzyme to break down the cellulose plant cell wall and release the starches and sugars inside that the yeast can then make into ethanol alcohol.
Corn for ethanol fuel, like soybeans for bio-diesel, were intended as temporary, easily adapted without the need for purchasing new equipment, alternate crop use for farmers to help alleviate the fossil fuels shortage/carbon pollution. The huge advantage of biofuels are that they are carbon neutral, closed loop systems - unlike fossil fuels which takes tremendous amounts of carbon that had been sequestered away for tens to hundreds of millions of years and releases it back into the atmosphere.