Stop burning our food
Under the weight of increasing food and fuel costs, leaders at the D8 are calling for a shift away from biofuel crops in favor of ensuring that sufficient quantities of food are produced.
Abdullah Badawi, the Malaysian prime minister, said the use of arable land for biofuels “should be stopped because such action will deepen the global food scarcity and further drive up food prices”.
“We must not allow the zeal for energy security to come into direct conflict with the basic need for food production,” he told the Developing Eight summit in Kuala Lumpur.
Data is beginning to support the contention that instead of attaining fuel security, the escalation in production of biofuels has instead been directly responsible for the increasing distortion of food prices as well as increases in the costs of fuel.
Last Friday the Guardian Newspaper printed a story on an as-yet unpublished World Bank report that indicates biofuel policy and production is responsible for a 75% increase in global fuel prices.
Rising food prices have pushed 100m people worldwide below the poverty line, estimates the World Bank, and have sparked riots from Bangladesh to Egypt. Government ministers here have described higher food and fuel prices as “the first real economic crisis of globalisation”.
“Without the increase in biofuels, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate,” says the report. The basket of food prices examined in the study rose by 140% between 2002 and this February. The report estimates that higher energy and fertiliser prices accounted for an increase of only 15%, while biofuels have been responsible for a 75% jump over that period.
It argues that production of biofuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going towards the production of biodiesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for biofuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.
But from a much less empirical standpoint, shouldn’t the implications of intermingling food and fuel policies have seemed lacking in common sense right from the start?
After all, when I was a kid, my mother told me that it was bad manners to play with my food. I can only imagine that burning it would have horrified her.
