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.
FALSE DOCUMENTS? Actor William Liao said he was ‘voluntarily cooperating’ with police after a suspect was accused of helping to produce false medical certificates Police yesterday questioned at least six entertainers amid allegations of evasion of compulsory military service, with Lee Chuan (李銓), a member of boy band Choc7 (超克7), and actor Daniel Chen (陳大天) among those summoned. The New Taipei City District Prosecutors’ Office in January launched an investigation into a group that was allegedly helping men dodge compulsory military service using falsified medical documents. Actor Darren Wang (王大陸) has been accused of being one of the group’s clients. As the investigation expanded, investigators at New Taipei City’s Yonghe Precinct said that other entertainers commissioned the group to obtain false documents. The main suspect, a man surnamed
DEMOGRAPHICS: Robotics is the most promising answer to looming labor woes, the long-term care system and national contingency response, an official said Taiwan is to launch a five-year plan to boost the robotics industry in a bid to address labor shortages stemming from a declining and aging population, the Executive Yuan said yesterday. The government approved the initiative, dubbed the Smart Robotics Industry Promotion Plan, via executive order, senior officials told a post-Cabinet meeting news conference in Taipei. Taiwan’s population decline would strain the economy and the nation’s ability to care for vulnerable and elderly people, said Peter Hong (洪樂文), who heads the National Science and Technology Council’s (NSTC) Department of Engineering and Technologies. Projections show that the proportion of Taiwanese 65 or older would
Democracies must remain united in the face of a shifting geopolitical landscape, former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) told the Copenhagen Democracy Summit on Tuesday, while emphasizing the importance of Taiwan’s security to the world. “Taiwan’s security is essential to regional stability and to defending democratic values amid mounting authoritarianism,” Tsai said at the annual forum in the Danish capital. Noting a “new geopolitical landscape” in which global trade and security face “uncertainty and unpredictability,” Tsai said that democracies must remain united and be more committed to building up resilience together in the face of challenges. Resilience “allows us to absorb shocks, adapt under
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it is building nine new advanced wafer manufacturing and packaging factories this year, accelerating its expansion amid strong demand for high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The chipmaker built on average five factories per year from 2021 to last year and three from 2017 to 2020, TSMC vice president of advanced technology and mask engineering T.S. Chang (張宗生) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “We are quickening our pace even faster in 2025. We plan to build nine new factories, including eight wafer fabrication plants and one advanced