Will EU Use of Biofuels Force People to Starve?

It is a common belief that biofuels are very environmentally friendly. They are completely renewable, they contribute fewer carbon emissions and they give us a useful alternative to fossil fuels. This may be true, but it is not the whole picture. In order to produce biofuels, we need to grow large amounts of plant material to provide the starting materials – palm oil, sugar cane, maize or whatever. This takes a large area of land and, where land is in short supply there can be a conflict between the land needed for growing food and the land needed to produce biofuels.

Adverse Environmental Effects

The effects on the environment can also be less than friendly. In some parts of Indonesia, for example, the increase in demand for biofuels in the last few years from Europe has led farmers to expand their growing areas. To do this they have cut down the mature palm trees growing around their farms to provide the palm oil that is a rich source material for biodiesel. The ecosystems that existed in the dense palm forests have been lost and even more land is now taken up growing palm trees as a crop. Because fast growth is encouraged and young trees are cut down often, there is no time for those complex ecosystems to get established again.

Food Shortages and Ethanol in Brazil

The first signs that the increased demand for biofuels might lead to starvation came from Brazil a few years ago. The government there has been promoting the production of biofuels from sugar cane since the mid 1970s and the promise of tax breaks and clear profit stimulated farms all over the country to switch their land use to biofuel crops. Many farms did the same thing at the same time and, as a result, the country experienced a major food shortage, which sent the price of staple foods skyrocketing.

New Food Crisis

Since that time, we don’t seem to have learned very much. In 2007 and 2008, there was a global food shortage that was sparked by the lower amounts of food being produced in agricultural land all over the world. Converting land over to biodiesel production was thought to be to blame. The World Bank certainly decided that this was so. In the industrialised world, nobody starved - but we are now paying around 70% more for our food than we were five years ago. If you look closely at your weekly food shopping bill, you can sometimes see the prices increasing by around 2% per week.

This is bad enough for those of us lucky to be able to afford these price increases but for families on or below the poverty line in the UK and Europe, this is serious. It is catastrophic for families in the developing world. Calculations show that if food prices quadruple in a decade, around 60% of the population of the world could be put in a situation where they simply cannot afford enough food. Starvation may not result immediately, but the threat of serious malnutrition is very real.

Alternative to Biofuels?

We are rapidly approaching the time when we need to think in terms of using alternatives to biofuels as much as alternatives to fossil fuels and neither will solve our energy requirements in the long term. Truly renewable power sources such as solar energy, wind power and hydroelectric power are fine for electricity generation but not really suitable for powering cars. Hydrogen and electric vehicles may be the answer – but more research and development will be needed to turn the current prototypes into fully working models.