Todd Church's face lights up when he recalls the August day he gave presidential candidate Barack Obama a tour of the VerSun ethanol plant near Charles City, a town of 7,800 people in north-eastern Iowa.

"It was great to meet a politician face-to-face like that," says Mr Church, plant manager at the 110m gallons-a-year facility, one of the biggest in the state.

"He seemed genuinely interested. About 3,000 local people turned up to hear him speak about his support for ethanol. They're still talking about it in Charles City."

Mr Obama's visit not only symbolises how every vote counts ahead of Iowa's caucus on Thursday, it also speaks of the political clout of the ethanol industry in the state, the US's biggest producer of the corn-based alternative fuel.

In the heart of America's Corn Belt that stretches from Ohio to Nebraska, ethanol is the most dynamic and influential sector in Iowa.

And as Iowa's political influence spikes once every four years as the first state to vote on the presidential hopefuls, the ethanol industry is paid immense attention by all the candidates.

When the last presidential caucus was held in 2004, Iowa produced 860m gallons of ethanol. A year later, after Washington introduced a renewable fuel standard mandating the yearly production of 7.5bn gallons by 2012, the industry enjoyed a growth spurt. Today, Iowa's 28 plants are responsible for 2bn gallons of the US's annual production of 7bn gallons, with 18 new plants expected to add 1.6bn gallons next year.

As a result ethanol is one of the few issues on which there is near-consensus among the leading presidential hopefuls on both sides.

"If you want to be president and you're running in the Iowa caucuses, you have to support ethanol," says Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute, a free-market think-tank in Washington that opposes the industry.

Full Story: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/04f0a668-b71b-11dc-aa38-0000779fd2ac.html

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