The biofuel argument explained

Chris Smyth writes:

It's a powerful image - a fat American snatches the corn off the plate of a hungry African, saying 'sorry, I need this to run my SUV'. That, in essence, is the case against biofuels. By diverting land and crops that could have been used to produce food, they have contributed to spiralling food prices and mass hunger around the world.

But is it really true? And even if it is, what can be done about it? Squabbles over these questions have threatened to derail the world food summit in Rome.

Lining up to take the scythe to biofuels are many developing countries and NGOs. Oxfam claims that the grain needed to make biofuels needed to fill one SUV tank could feed a person for a year. The aid agency says that, according to the best estimates by the OECD, biofuels are responsible for as much 30 per cent of recent food price rises.

The US, which heavily subsidises its farmers to produce crops for ethanol production, puts that number much lower, at two or three per cent. Much more important to food price rises it says, are oil prices and rising demand. It won't agree to a statement that puts too much blame on biofuels. European countries are are backing America - the EU has a target of getting 10 per cent of its transport fuel from renewables and won't hit it without biofuels.

But the story is not quite the simple one of the rich verses the rest. Brazil is one of the world's biggest producers of biofuels, and its president has been one of their most vocal defenders at the summit. "It offends me to see fingers pointed against clean energy from biofuels, fingers soiled with oil and coal," Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said.

And it gets more complicated. Brazil's ethanol comes largely from unsubsidised sugarcane. President Lula is just as scornful of corn, which is used to make ethanol in the US, saying it can only be competitive when "shot up with subsidies and shielded behind tariff barriers".

NGOs agree that corn is the real villain of the piece - you get less ethanol out of a given amount of corn as you would from the same amount of sugarcane, so much more land is needed to produce the same amount of fuel. Plus, US corn is diverted directly from food, while Brazilian sugar cane has generally been grown on additional land.

What's more, Brazilian sugarcane ethanol reduces greenhouse gases, relative to fossil fuels, by 80-90 per cent, while US maize ethanol from cuts emissions by just 10-30 percent, according to the UN.

But sugarcane isn't without its critics, who claim that it contributes to destruction of the Amazonian rain forest and that its traditional production methods exploit workers. Besides, sugar cane doesn't fare well in the harsh northern climes of Europe or the Midwest, and the US isn't going to give up on corn anyway, particularly not in an election year when corn farmers exert a powerful sway in key swing states.

Which is why western leaders are pinning their hopes on "second-generation" biofuels, which would make fuel of the non-edible parts of plants such stalks and leaves - even orange peel or genetically-modified algae. Yet such fuels are at least five years away from being viable, says the US secretary of agriculture.  The wrangling looks set to go on for some time to come.

Comments

[John Torcassi]

If you want to explain biofuel you need to mention something that's been reported widely for a couple of years. It takes more oil to make a gallon of biofuel from corn than it takes to make it from oil itself. And that's because of the amount of energy it takes in fertilizer, pesticides, and processing. More CO2. This is an unfortunate example of Agribusiness taking advantage of naive environmentalists. Add to that the media's inability to deal with complex stories.

[Miri]

No mention of using waste cooking oil to produce biofuels? Using waste oil means that:

a) There's no competition with food
b) There's less waste going into landfills
c) At present, given that this tends to be done on the smaller scale, the "raw" material is closer to the manufacturers, who in turn are closer to their distribution base, cutting down on the transportation costs.