Hailed until only months ago as a silver bullet in the fight against global warming, biofuels are now accused of snatching food out of the mouths of the poor.
Billions have been poured into developing sugar and grain-based ethanol and biodiesel to help wean rich economies from their addiction to carbon-belching fossil fuels, the overwhelming source of man-made global warming.
Heading the rush are the US, Brazil and Canada, which are eagerly transforming corn, wheat, soybeans and sugarcane into cleaner-burning fuel and the EU is to launch its own ambitious program.
But as soaring prices for staples bring more of the planet’s most vulnerable people face-to-face with starvation, the image of biofuels has suddenly changed from climate savior to a horribly misguided experiment.
On Friday, the head of the IMF said biofuels “posed a real moral problem” and called for a moratorium on using food crops to power cars, trucks and buses.
The vital problem of global warming “has to be balanced with the fact that there are people who are going to starve to death,” Dominique Strauss-Kahn said.
“Producing biofuels is a crime against humanity,” the UN’s special rapporteur for the right to food, Jean Ziegler of Switzerland, had said earlier.
Biofuels may still be in their infancy but they are growing rapidly, with annual production leaping by double-digit percentages.
In a speech on Wednesday that set down a target for reducing US carbon emissions, US President George W. Bush pointed to legislation requiring US producers to supply at least 136 billion liters of renewable fuel by 2020.
Last year, 20 percent of grain — 81 million tonnes — produced in the US was used to make ethanol, according to US think tank the Earth Policy Institute, which said the percentage will jump to nearly a quarter this year.
“We are looking at a five-fold increase in renewable fuel,” Bush’s top climate change adviser, Jim Connaughton, said in Paris on Thursday at a meeting of the world’s major greenhouse-gas polluters.
But more than half of that legislatively-mandated production would come from the “second-generation” biofuels that are made from non-food sources such as switchgrass and wood byproducts, he said.
The EU’s and the Brazilian delegates in Paris contested the link between biofuels and the world food crisis.
“This is highly exaggerated,” said Sergio Serra, Brazil’s ambassador for climate change.
“There is no real relation of cause and effect between the expansion of the production of biofuels and the raising of food prices. At least it is not happening in Brazil,” he said.
EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said experts would report back by the end of next month on how to guarantee that Europe’s planned biofuel boost would not impinge on the environment or the poor.
“There are a lot of concerns about social impacts, rising food prices and environment issues, and for all those reasons we want to insist on sustainability criteria in our legislation,” he said.
Defenders of biofuels say food shortfalls have multiple causes, including a growing appetite for meat among the burgeoning middle class in China and India.
WAITING GAME: The US has so far only offered a ‘best rate tariff,’ which officials assume is about 15 percent, the same as Japan, a person familiar with the matter said Taiwan and the US have completed “technical consultations” regarding tariffs and a finalized rate is expected to be released soon, Executive Yuan spokeswoman Michelle Lee (李慧芝) told a news conference yesterday, as a 90-day pause on US President Donald Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs is set to expire today. The two countries have reached a “certain degree of consensus” on issues such as tariffs, nontariff trade barriers, trade facilitation, supply chain resilience and economic security, Lee said. They also discussed opportunities for cooperation, investment and procurement, she said. A joint statement is still being negotiated and would be released once the US government has made
NEW GEAR: On top of the new Tien Kung IV air defense missiles, the military is expected to place orders for a new combat vehicle next year for delivery in 2028 Mass production of Tien Kung IV (Sky Bow IV) missiles is expected to start next year, with plans to order 122 pods, the Ministry of National Defense’s (MND) latest list of regulated military material showed. The document said that the armed forces would obtain 46 pods of the air defense missiles next year and 76 pods the year after that. The Tien Kung IV is designed to intercept cruise missiles and ballistic missiles to an altitude of 70km, compared with the 60km maximum altitude achieved by the Missile Segment Enhancement variant of PAC-3 systems. A defense source said yesterday that the number of
‘CRUDE’: The potential countermeasure is in response to South Africa renaming Taiwan’s representative offices and the insistence that it move out of Pretoria Taiwan is considering banning exports of semiconductors to South Africa after the latter unilaterally downgraded and changed the names of Taiwan’s two representative offices, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said yesterday. On Monday last week, the South African Department of International Relations and Cooperation unilaterally released a statement saying that, as of April 1, the Taipei Liaison Offices in Pretoria and Cape Town had been renamed the “Taipei Commercial Office in Johannesburg” and the “Taipei Commercial Office in Cape Town.” Citing UN General Assembly Resolution 2758, it said that South Africa “recognizes the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the sole
Taiwanese exports to the US are to be subject to a 20 percent tariff starting on Thursday next week, according to an executive order signed by US President Donald Trump yesterday. The 20 percent levy was the same as the tariffs imposed on Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh by Trump. It was higher than the tariffs imposed on Japan, South Korea and the EU (15 percent), as well as those on the Philippines (19 percent). A Taiwan official with knowledge of the matter said it is a "phased" tariff rate, and negotiations would continue. "Once negotiations conclude, Taiwan will obtain a better
RSS