biofuels

This is the logical outcome of using fossil fuel inputs to grow food, and then turning that food into fuel.

As Evans-Pritchard points out, “energy and food have ‘converged’ in price and can increasingly be switched from one use to another,” which is just a polite way of saying that, in a time of scarcity, rich people’s ability to pay for fuel will quickly outstrip poor people’s ability to pay for food.

Why the price of ‘peak oil’ is famine

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor
The London Telegraph
February 9, 2008

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The International Food Policy Research Institute has joined the chorus of groups and individuals speaking out against the biofuel bandwagon.

Read Stephen Leahy’s Inter Press Service article here.

There’s a lot of good information surfacing recently on the follies of making fuel out of food. Paul Beingessner, in a recent edition of his weekly syndicated column, does an excellent job of cutting through the hype to lay bare the major problems that the expansion of the biofuels industry creates — especially for the world’s poor…

–Editor

By Paul Beingessner
Column # 626
July 3, 2007

Increasing prices for grains and oilseeds have some farmers optimistic about agriculture for the first time in years. The agrofuels industry is one of the main causes for increasing grain prices. The other is the fact that for nearly a decade, the earth’s population has consumed more grains that it has produced. Agrofuels became the tipping point that caused speculators and genuine grain buyers to realize that the supply/demand equation for food was tilting dangerously. Now, more than in the last number of decades, the market is hanging on every weather report from around the world.

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