I am 99% sure that corn ethanol is US and Brazil story. Anyway with oil prices this low, it makes no sense. The whole idea was insane from the beginning as corn ethanol has negative EROI (more energy is spent on producing a single unit of corn ethanol than you can produce by burning it.).
It makes more sense if you think about it as an artificial market for the excess corn produced by US farmers. You have to do something with it, might as well make HFCS and ethanol.
Thankfully, there are other things that can be done (specifically, making food) with that same corn - it just requires a bit more processing (mechanical or chemical) to free the endosperm from the hull.
