Energy, climate fuel food concerns

WORLD agriculture is at a turning point: energy and climate change are redefining the global food situation. As demand for affordable energy increases, along with greenhouse gas emissions, bioenergy is increasingly seen as an economically and environmentally sound solution. The growing potential of biofuels appears to create a substantial opportunity for the world’s farmers in both industrialised and developing countries.

A modern biofuel industry could also provide developing-country farmers with a use for crop residues and marginal land, and generate additional employment in rural areas. However, the extent to which farmers will be able to realise the benefits of switching to biofuels production depends on many conditions, including access to markets and access to technological innovation.
Despite the significant, positive potential of bioenergy, biofuels also pose challenges, especially for the poor in developing countries. Increased production of energy crops, for example, has the potential to exacerbate socio-economic inequalities by concentrating benefits in the hands of those who are already well-off. If not well managed, biofuel production can also lead to deforestation, a loss of biodiversity, and excessive use of fertilisers and pesticides, thereby degrading the land and water that poor people depend on.

More importantly, biofuels could increase food prices. According to analyses by the International Food Policy Research Institute, such price increases could range between 5-15per cent for various crops, given the current plans for biofuel production. Aggressive growth in biofuels, however, could lead to even greater price increases. By 2020, prices for grain crops could increase by 20-40 per cent, over and above other causes for price increases, including increased demand from the growing and wealthier populations of developing countries.

Such price increases would pose difficulties for many of the world’s one billion poor people who earn only a dollar a day and typically spend 50c-70c of that on food. However, new technologies that increase efficiency and productivity in crop production and biofuel processing could reduce these price increases.

The Canberra Times