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.
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