Biofuels under a shadow - We can’t use food if it fuels starvation

THE EU Commission has rejected claims that producing biofuels is a “crime against humanity” that threatens world food supplies.

The commission also insisted our biofuel policy, aimed at confronting climate and energy challenges, will not be changed. Only yesterday all sellers of transport fuel in Britain became obliged, under law, to mix ethanol made from crops with all fuels.

However, last Friday, an advisory panel to the European Environment Agency (EEA) said that the EU should suspend its goal of having 10% of transportation fuel made from biofuel by 2020. The report adds weight to the strengthening argument against biofuels because of the impact their production is having on poor countries’ food supplies.

A very short while ago biofuels were advanced as part of a range of solutions to the world’s climate and energy problems. Now we are told that the cure may be worse than the disease. That by trying to confront those great issues that we are causing hardship and hunger for hundreds of millions of people.

Our well-intentioned rush to biofuels has caused too many negatives, including raging food inflation and shortages in nearly 40 countries.

The World Bank says rising prices could push 100,000,000 people deeper into poverty. Soaring food costs have sparked violence in Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Mauritania and the Philippines. In Pakistan and Thailand troops are being used to protect food in fields or warehouses.

These food riots come at a time of plenty. Last year’s cereal harvest, at 2.1 billion tonnes, broke all records. There is plenty of food but it is not reaching humans. Of the 2.13bn tonnes likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, will feed people.

Some will go towards biofuels in what increasingly seems an immoral conversion of badly needed food to fuel. The World Bank points out that “the grain required to fill the tank of an SUV with ethanol... could feed a person for a year”.

Another extraordinary proportion will go towards the production of meat for human consumption. Beef cattle eat about 8kg of grain or meal for every kilogram of flesh they produce.

The statistics are all but infinite, and the arguments passionate and evolving, but one thing seems certain: if the production of biofuels is causing hunger on the scale suggested, they have no part to play in our energy policies. The conflict involved may be resolved in time but poor people cannot starve just because we — rich people — want to drive cars.

Great hope was invested in the potential of biofuels and we still have significant tax breaks in place to encourage their use. It is a pity that there is now a shadow over that hope.

In light of the EEA advice, the EU Commission, our government and all of us will have to reconsider our attitude towards biofuels.