Copyright (c) 2010 Alison Withers

According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation food and bioenergy crops are now competing for land, water and other resources in many parts of the world.

The FAO argues that the rising price of basic foods in 2007 – 08 that generated food scarcity worries and import restrictions in some countries wasn’t caused only by poor harvests in major producing countries and high oil and energy prices raising the cost of inputs like fertilizers and irrigation as well as the transport costs of inputs and food.

The speculation on the commodity markets was also partly driven by the rising demand for liquid biofuel, it says.

The environmental argument for using bio-diesel made from oilseed rape, or bio-ethanol, manufactured from wheat, maize or sugar, is the significantly lower carbon dioxide emissions over the full cycle of production and use compared with fossil fuels.

Not surprisingly the prospect of a smaller carbon footprint and greater energy security has encouraged Governments around the world to offer tax breaks to encourage use of biofuels and to set targets for the inclusion of biofuels in transport and other fuels.

When there was an over-supply of commodities like food it was fine, but not once it was clear that global population growth and diet change were together generating increased demand for food while climate change with its associated droughts and storms seemed to be limiting the world’s productive capacity.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), confusingly, takes the view that the increase in biofuels production has NOT been the dominant driver of food price inflationfor certain crops and certain countries.

It cites long-term factors – like the failure to accord the importance it deserved to the agricultural sector during the last decades, plus distorted agricultural markets and the dismantling of policies supporting domestic markets in developing countries – as being far more accountable for the present food crisis than biofuels.

It argues that where biofuels have had an impact, the relationship between biofuels and food price spikes should be interpreted more as a policy failure than as an intrinsic and unavoidable consequence of the production of biofuels. Nevertheless plainly bioenergy can provide opportunities to increase rural incomes and employment.

But while rising commodity prices imply potential greater profits from switching land to crops for biofuels they also arguably lead to the destruction of vast areas of rainforest, as trees are felled to make way for palm oil plantations in countries like Brazil and Malaysia, and to the threat of creating “a monocultural desert, devoid of biodiversity, across vast swathes of the British countryside”.

According to Andre Croppenstedt, an economist with the Agricultural Development Economics Division of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, biofuel production need not compete with food production if biofuel demand generates increased incomes for farm households and this in turn is invested in raising productivity of all farm activities, including food production.

UNCTAD also argues that what’s needed in the longer term is support for investment efforts aimed at enhancing the agricultural productivity of developing countries, particularly of small farmers, and making sure that these investments increase farmers’ ability “to capture a larger share of the growing agricultural revenues”

Whatever the pros and cons of the arguments there is a finite amount of available crop-producing land,

So there needs to be greater investment in the resources and support farmers need to improve their land’s yield while farming sustainably.

One way of doing that would be to support the efforts of biopesticide developers with globally agreed and quicker regulation of their new generation low-chem agricultural products and with Government investment towards the costs of developing more environmentally friendly crop protection and yield enhancing products.

Even if such higher yielding methods come to market, however, land availability still sets limits to how much cna be produced.

Investment should therefore be also coupled with promoting the development of second-generation biofuels – based on converting cellulose resources such as grass and fast-growing trees into fuels – to help to limit the direct competition between food and fuel associated with most first-generation biofuels.

The EC Climate Change Initiative accepted that second generation biofuels produced from materials like straw and forestry residues could enable far greater reductions in Greenhouse gases.

It also advocates selecting an overall production chain that can use a high yielding biomass crop to improve land use efficiency.

For instance most oils seed crops only produce a few tonnes per hectare per annum, sugar and starch crops may generate 5 to 10 tonnes, while significantly greater yields come from woody plants – or from conventional crops like cereals if the straw can be used.