Do Biofuels Threaten the World with Starvation?

Is this a reasonable trade-off: increased production of biofuels, reduced production of food and billions of people starving worldwide? In other words, more ethanol, less human life?

That's the grim scenario forecast by professor John Beddington, chief scientific advisor for the British government in a speech recently before a London conference on sustainability.

But many of Beddington's government peers and colleagues, including some of Britain's top and most influential ministers, have endorsed an initiative to produce and use more biofuels in the years to come as a renewable energy replacement for ever more expensive oil and to move toward energy independence.

Supporters of the plan also cite a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions as another benefit in the use of biofuels.

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Beddington, however, adamantly opposes the plan which he says will create severe food shortages which could devastate world populations, especially the poorest, as thoroughly as global climate change.

World population is expected to increase by 2030 enough to require 50 percent more food than is currently being produced, according to Beddington. Fifty years later twice that amount would be necessary to feed the growing population.

"It's very hard to imagine how we can see the world growing enough crops to produce renewable energy and at the same time meet the enormous demand for food," Beddington said in his remarks to confreres.

In the biofuel-caused nightmare to come, Beddington predicts, more land will diverted away from the growing of produce.

The result: Food riots among starving masses worldwide. Huge water shortages (it takes 50 tons of water to grow one tone of wheat). Soaring food prices and an inflationary spiral with no ceiling in sight.

In 2006 a bushel of corn traded at $2 on the Chicago Board of Trade. Prices for the same bushel now hover at $5 per bushel and above. Expensive feed corn for livestock hikes the price for everything derived from cattle, pork and poultry. That means meat, eggs, and milk, all dietary staples, will keep escalating in cost.

Buddington is not alone in his opposition to the increased use of biofuels.

"Biofuel production currently adversely affects the poor through price-level and price-volatility effects," the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) said in a report. "Since the beginning of 2000, butter and milk prices have tripled, and poultry prices have almost doubled."

Last December when the new U.S. energy bill was enacted the government was required to subsidize 36 billion gallons of ethanol annually with a 51-cent-per-gallon payment. Ethanol production now devours 20 percent of the U.S. corn crop, a huge bite by any measure.

"This leap in corn prices [and the diversion of corn to ethanol production] is leading to an emerging opposition to ethanol subsidies on the part of animal agriculture, export markets and other corn users," a Purdue University study reported.

Bottom line: Ethanol may not be the energy solution so many had hoped for and the U.S. dependence on foreign oil continues, with prices at $110 a barrel recently and expected to climb.

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