Fermenting the Food Supply

Many people are aware that food-based biofuel production has had an influence on food prices. Many people also know that US ethanol production is growing rapidly and now using a noticeable fraction of the total corn supply. However, I’m going to argue that the situation in the near term is potentially more serious than is generally realized.


I will use a mixture of existing data, analysis of biofuel profitability, and simple modeling of biofuel production as an infection or diffusion process affecting the food supply, to demonstrate that there are reasonably plausible scenarios for biofuel production growth to cause mass starvation of the global poor, and that this could happen fairly quickly – quite possibly within five years, and certainly well within the life of the existing policy regimes. It doesn’t have to be this way, but unless we start doing things differently soon, the risks are significant.

This piece is very long, and I apologize for that. But I think it’s important – I’m coming to the view that biofuel growth is by far the greatest near-term challenge arising from the plateauing of global oil supply that we have experienced over the last two years.

The Oil Drum