Which technically should be sorted out through the market price. Ethanol is only viable when corn is cheap, which is only reached when supply greatly exceeds demand. However, then you run into people not liking their jobs tied to the random fluctuations of the corn market. The whole situation is kind of a big market failure full of small patches trying to stop the leaks.
I don't think it's a "market failure" so much as people not being willing to accept that "Sorry, today the value for the corn you painstakingly grew is close to $0", and they've been told since at least the '30s that the Federal government will take care of them (well, back then, it would if they were Democrats).
The New Deal policies, BTW, both raised food prices while the same USDA (US Department of Agriculture) estimated 25% of the population was malnourished, which was confirmed by the WWII draft. Which lead to the Federal school lunch program, which was eventually widely extended to breakfast, and now even dinner I hear in some places.
The government needing to take care of you seems like a pretty big market failure to me. And those attempts to take care, instead of solving the root of the problem, is what has ultimately lead to the need for ethanol.
Well, the problem is, how does a society address the issue of steadily decreasing commodity prices as science and engineering produce them?
The New Deal helped farmers, back then a much larger percentage of the population, at the expense of everyone else. The real solution was to move people from farming to industry, or as it turned out, the US military and industrial production to support it for WWII (and per the WWI song, "How 'Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm? (After They've Seen Paree)" (Paris), between that, the "GI Bill" subsidizing college education, learning all sorts of useful skills, etc. I gather many if not most didn't return).
The New Deal, as I've pointed out above, didn't really solve the problem when it's policies damaged so large a portion of the population. No Holodomor, but just as deliberate. I've seen a newsreel of this: http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/crops_17.ht... ; you can imagine what hungry people back then thought when they saw it.
