Carl Hausmann, chief executive of Bunge North America, doesn’t view the conflict between food and fuel as a moral issue. His company is an investor in several ethanol and biodiesel plants. But he nevertheless opposes government mandates for biofuel production, he said at  RCGA breakfast this morning.

Crops will be used for fuel if it’s economical to do so, Hausmann said, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Hausmann says he knows farmers who heat their houses with corn-burning stoves because even $7-a-bushel corn is a cheaper heat source than $120-a-barrel crude oil. But when the government requires the use of billions of gallons of biofuels annually, as Congress did in the 2007 energy bill, Hausmann says it has gone too far:

I believe very much in free markets. … I hate government mandates, including biofuels.

Bunge, one of the world’s largest agribusiness companies, knows it will be affected by debates over nutrition, food safety and the future of family farms. Hausmann says he hopes regulators will recognize the global nature of the agricultural supply chain and won’t overreact to safety and security concerns:

There is no greater incidence of imported food-borne disease than of domestically grown food-borne disease. We need to protect our food safety, but I hope we don’t resort to protectionism.