Biofuels "Prime Cause of Food Crisis"

The truth:

Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% — far more than previously estimated — according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian. The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body.

Why it will not be allowed out:

The figure emphatically contradicts the US government's claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.

Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush. "It would put the World Bank in a political hot-spot with the White House," said one yesterday.

After all, what's a little truth between friends?

Bye-Bye Biofuels...

When are people going to wake up to the fact that biofuels are not the solution, but actually exacerbate the world's problems?

A global rice shortage that has seen prices of one of the world's most important staple foods increase by 50 per cent in the past two weeks alone is triggering an international crisis, with countries banning export and threatening serious punishment for hoarders.

With rice stocks at their lowest for 30 years, prices of the grain rose more than 10 per cent on Friday to record highs and are expected to soar further in the coming months. Already China, India, Egypt, Vietnam and Cambodia have imposed tariffs or export bans, as it has become clear that world production of rice this year will decline in real terms by 3.5 per cent. The impact will be felt most keenly by the world's poorest populations, who have become increasingly dependent on the crop as the prices of other grains have become too costly.

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Analysts have cited many factors for the rises, including rising fuel and fertiliser expenses, as well as climate change. But while drought is one factor, another is the switch from food to biofuel production in large areas of the world, in particular to fulfil the US energy demands.

And this is just the beginning....

Plugging into the Enernet

The current system of highly-centralised power production is extremely vulnerable - be it to man-made or natural disasters - and a more decentralised approach, based on local generation of power, has many benefits. He's someone who has the right credentials to explore this line of thought: Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet:

There is a lot to be learned from building the Internet over the last four decades, and we should make that analogy and apply those lessons. The “Enernet” is what we are all building to meet the world’s need for cheap and clean energy. It will not happen overnight, and it will be hard to predict how the various technology will play out over time. For example, the Internet was built to network mainframe computers and now it connects mostly cell phones and PCs. That was a big surprise.

Also look at the lessons of standardized interfaces. For the Internet, it took some years to figure that out. Some of them didn’t emerge, like the web, until 1989. For the Enernet we can look to the methods of standardization and how we choose to organize this thing. Fuels, biofuels themselves, are a standard.

Well, maybe, but biofuels are not a panacea - not least because it's clear that done badly they can actually exacerbate environmental problems rather than ameliorating them.

Why Biofuels Are Bonkers, Part 3875

I knew biofuels were environmentally bad news, but it seems that they are even worse than I imagined:

Glub, glub. The plant consumes over a million kilos of corn per day. That’s good news for area farmers especially as the price has almost doubled due to high demand. The bad news is that our current agricultural system is petroleum-soaked. Chemical pesticides and fertilizers, machinery, irrigation pumps, and grain transport all depend on the stuff. Sustainable Table reports that each acre of corn, just in chemical pesticides and fertilizers, requires 5.5 gallons of petroleum .

Glub, glub. The plant uses 275 tons of coal a day, trucked down from Wyoming. Five rail cars, powered by diesel engines, head east with the finished ethanol each day.

Shluurrp. The plant uses 600,000 gallons of water every day to produce 150,000 gallons of ethanol. This water figure doesn’t account for pumped irrigation water (requiring petroleum) during corn cultivation.

So, nominally bio-friendly biofuels actually require lots of concretely polluting petrol and coal in order to be manufactured. So, wouldn't it just be easier to spend a little more time working on electric cars, renewable energy, you know, all that boring old stuff that might actually mitigate things, instead of creating this Escheresque staircase of pointless energy transmutation?

Not so Corny for the Mexicans

By embracing the NAFTA treaty, Mexico surrendered its corn output to the vagaries of the North American corn market. Now, all of a sudden, Americans want corn, lots of it. As part of a dubious strategy to make “cleaner” gasoline while rewarding Big Agriculture and farm states, the U.S. Government is shoveling huge subsidies to corn-based ethanol production. This new demand has bid up prices in the U.S. and caused acute corn shortages in Mexico, which in turn has tripled and quadrupled the price of tortillas.

Which just goes to show that "free" trade is neither free as in freedom nor free as in beer.

Biofuels and the Environmental Commons

Biofuels are much in the news lately. Generally, they are presented as a clever way of getting round oil-dependence, with the added bonus of being environmentally sound: after all, what could be greener than plants?

But step back to look at the bigger picture, and you see that biofuels are no solution; worse, they would actually be disastrous to the environmental commons:

The United States annually consumes more fossil and nuclear energy than all the energy produced in a year by the country's plant life, including forests and that used for food and fiber, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Energy and David Pimentel, a Cornell University researcher.

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Corn and soybean production as practiced in the Midwest is ecologically unsustainable. Its effects include massive topsoil erosion, pollution of surface and groundwater with pesticides, and fertilizer runoff that travels down the Mississippi River to deplete oxygen and life from a New Jersey-size portion of the Gulf of Mexico.