Biofuel can help poor as well as climate: FAO

Biofuel — “environmentally friendly” energy created from plants rather than oil — should not be seen as a threat to the world’s poor and may help increase food production, a U.N. food and energy expert said.

“It’s probably the best opportunity there has been since the ‘green revolution’ to bring really a new wind of development in rural areas,” Gustavo Best told Reuters in an interview.
He was referring to the huge increase in food production in the developing world, aided in part by new plant technologies that came into vogue in the 1960s.

“If done well,” he added. “If well managed, bio-energy production can bring new areas of development … new investment, new jobs and new infrastructure that can also benefit the food industry,” Best said on Monday.

That is a significant “if”. The FAO has highlighted the risk of increasing biofuel production for the world’s 854 million hungry people.

“Liquid biofuel production could threaten the availability of adequate food supplies by diverting land and other resources away from food crops,” it said in a study issued last month.

The FAO does not have definitive figures but Best estimated that, in all its uses, it accounted for 8-10 percent of global energy production, up from less than 5 percent 10 years ago.

Biofuels have a maximum potential of 20-30 percent of global energy production, he said, due to competing demand for land and water and continuing competition from fossil fuels and other sources.

Best said there was no evidence yet that biofuel production had reduced food availability in poor countries, but admitted it was a potential risk.

“We have to be careful that that doesn’t happen, (farmers) growing diesel for the rich and stopping producing food for their own families,” he said, but insisted the risks had been overplayed in the media.

Reuters