During the 2012 presidential election campaign, Romney took positions on agricultural subsidies that some media reports characterized as vague and somewhat contradictory. In May 2011, just days after rival Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty had declared that federal subsidies for the production of ethanol fuel should be phased out, Romney said that he was a supporter of ethanol subsidies. Five months later, while speaking on agricultural subsidies at a roundtable discussion with Iowa farmers and business leaders, Romney said, "I'm not running for office based on making promises of handing out money. ... We're going to have to live within our means." He also said that while he had supported ethanol subsidies in the past in order to help the ethanol fuel industry become established, and that he continued to believe that ethanol should play a role in meeting the nation's energy needs, he agreed with the discontinuation of the tax credit for production of ethanol from corn that was scheduled to occur two months later. On the subject of agricultural subsidies more generally, Romney wrote in response to a 2012 questionnaire from the American Farm Bureau Federation that "other nations subsidize their farmers, so we must be careful not to unilaterally change our policies in a way that would disadvantage agriculture here in our country." He made similar remarks on the campaign trail in August 2012, without explicitly referring to subsidies: "We don't want to find ourselves with regards to our food supply in the same kind of position we are in with our energy supply, so it's important for us to make sure that our farmers are able to stay on the farm and raise the crops that we need to have a secure source of food. So I believe in supports that will allow us to do that."