The recent surge in global food prices that has triggered unrest in developing nations – most visible in the Haitian and Egyptian riots – has prompted the United Nations to label biofuels a crime against humanity. Since biofuels represent a delicate confluence in the challenge of global food and energy demands, it is worth exploring the equation of biofuel solutions and the needs of the global economic prosperity engines that are enlisting these solutions.
As an alternative to fossil fuels, biofuels are not the clean source some corners of the global agriculture sector have been depicting. In February 2008, The New York Times reported, “Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these ‘green’ fuels are taken into account…” The techniques involved in biofuel production – and the combustion of biofuels in vehicles around the world – are producing the very negative impact to the stratosphere that the promise of the biofuel industry was entrusted to help halt. The core environmental benefit of using biofuels does not appear to exist.
Additionally, biofuels represent a significant impact on worldwide water consumption – and given that one billion people are currently lacking access to healthy drinking water, this consumption presents another challenge to global populations. In 2007, David Trouba, spokesman for the Stockholm International Water Institute, reflected on this concern, “Where will the water to grow the food needed to feed a growing population come from if more and more water is diverted to crops for biofuels production?”
Factoring in the direct affects that corn-based ethanol, for example, have had on higher food costs, and the question of biofuels as a crime against humanity is more keenly amplified.
But are we only examining one half of the equation? Have we not created the biofuels technology to help answer global energy demands? And are not global energy demands a reflection of greater global prosperity and industry?
The question then becomes one of encouraging development among developing nations – and the impact this has on the many countries that struggle with periodic famines. What are we willing to sacrifice in our march toward global comforts?
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “Economic development is normally accompanied by improvements in a country’s food supply and the gradual elimination of dietary deficiencies, thus improving the overall nutritional status of the country’s population. Furthermore it also brings about qualitative changes in the production, processing, distribution and marketing of food.”
The key missing components in this assessment are found in the growth in population relative to economic development – and the loss of arable farmland incurred by population expansions. Less land and more people means greater demand for less food. Removing biofuels from the equation for a moment, the growth of worldwide populations alone contributes directly to higher food prices.
Worldwide demand for more comfortable living is demonstrated in recent dramatic energy inflation. As an example, the natural-gas market is experiencing robust global trade – and prices have jumped 93% since August, 2007. Referencing The Wall Street Journal: “What’s new is the global price competition. Prior to 2003, gas was primarily a regional commodity, consumed near where it was produced and transported by pipelines…That changed with development of cheaper methods for supercooling and transporting the fuel across the ocean in liquefied form, which requires 1/600th the space. The global trade took off.” Here, technology is creating efficiencies to bring more energy to more people – and creating more reliance on an energy source that had been unavailable only five years prior.
But in the face of large-scale periodic famine, water shortages for vast populations, and environmental shortfalls in biofuel production, are biofuels a crime against humanity? Probably. But we are up against it on the bigger question of sustainable worldwide population – and the necessary amenities of that population. Economic prosperity comes with its vices – and while it appears that biofuels are not ready for primetime, a cheap alternative energy source is going to have to present itself soon.
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