Blame it on Biofuels: The Same Old Food vs Fuel Argument Is Back Again and Just as Irrelevant as Last Time

by Joelle Brink (Biofuels Digest Asia) ...(M)ost of the food vs fuel stories archived on the web were dated either 2008 or 2011, and that many seemed remarkably similar. That’s when it dawned on me that very few people want to take the time to understand the global weather cycles, commodities markets and political situations that actually drive food emergencies.
...The global food crisis of 2010-2011 has been a humanitarian disaster of enormous proportions for billions of families worldwide and for many in our own communities as well if we stop to think about it. It’s at least partly responsible for some of the present global unrest, although greed and bad government likely play larger roles. But we can’t go out and arrest Mother Earth for having a bad year, lock up La Nina for causing droughts, floods and cyclones, jail the world’s corrupt politicians, or force the world commodities markets to become humanitarian nonprofits.
All we can do is stretch what remains of past years’ harvests to prevent outright disaster for the most vulnerable, in the process raising food prices for everyone else. Consider the grocer. What can he tell his customers that they will understand? The blame must fall somewhere, and that’s where biofuels come in.
Problem is, there’s a cost to blaming biofuels and it’s a very steep one. READ MORE and MORE (Part 2) and MORE (The Australian)
From Biofuels Digest Asia part 2: ...An anti-biofuels opinion piece in the leading Thai news outlet The Nation, shows where all this is heading. “Thailand’s bio-fuel policy as it stands today is not sustainable and will have a significant negative impact on the country’s food supply chain in the long run. This dilemma has also affected other countries where bio-fuels are heavily promoted at the expense of the food supply chain, resulting in upward pressures on the prices of food crops that are used as raw materials for ethanol production.”
Not a word about the palm oil speculators and hoarders who have taken tonnes of palm oil out of the market awaiting higher prices, leaving both supermarket shelves and consumers’ cupboards bare. READ MORE and READ MORE and MORE (see excerpt below)
In a recent report Brian Doidge, on behalf of the Ontario Agri-Food Technologies, stated criticism against Biofuels fails to represent the truth. He explains what many fail to realize. “When corn is used to make ethanol, one third of a bushel of corn ends up as dried distiller’s grains (DDG) which is used as animal feed. Therefore, although some corn acres may have been diverted away from feed grains to biofuel production, one third of those acres still end up as feed.”
Doidge also dispels the common argument that biofuel production diverts acres away from oilseeds, wheat and rice production. According to data from the Foreign Agricultural Service of the United States Department of Agriculture, the world acreage of nearly all major crops either has increased or stayed the same since 2000. “Corn acreage has increased 15%, oilseed acreage is up 11.4% and rice acreage is at a record high of 381.1 million acres, an increase of 1.7% since 2000, wheat acres have remained steady”. This data does not substantiate the argument that acres of food grains and oilseeds are suffering. Doidge says rising oil prices have played a role in the crises and as India and China increased their demand for oil, oil prices soared more than food prices. READ MORE