Contributed by Ginny Mckinney
EU and US demand for biofuels is pushing up world food prices and increasing climate emissions. And the World Food Program warned last week that rapidly rising costs are endangering emergency food supplies for the world's worst-off.
The richest countries are using more and more biofuels--alcohol made from plant products, used in place of gasoline to fuel cars. Biofuels are billed as a way to slow down climate change. But in reality, because so much land is being cleared to grow them, most biofuels today are causing more global warming emissions than they prevent. And they are pushing the price of corn, wheat, and other staples out of reach for millions of people.
Filling the tank of an SUV with ethanol requires enough corn to feed a person for a year. Not all biofuels are bad - making ethanol from Brazilian sugar cane is more efficient than US-grown corn, for example, and green technology for making fuel from waste is improving rapidly. But without tough global standards, the biofuels boom will further undermine food security and worsen global warming.
The problem is that the EU and the US have set targets for increasing the use of biofuels without sorting the good from the bad. As a result, rainforests are being cleared in Indonesia to grow palm oil for European biodiesel refineries, and global grain reserves are running dangerously low. Meanwhile, rich-country politicians can look "green" without asking their citizens to conserve energy, and agribusiness giants are cashing in. And if nothing changes, the situation will only get worse.
What's needed are strong global standards that encourage better biofuels and shut down the trade in bad ones.
Source: Avaaz.org
A local developer named Tony Joudi has been promoting huge corn plantations on Andros for biofuel production. The bad kind. The Cape Eleuthera Institute and Bahamas Waste have cut a deal to produce biodiesel from used cooking oil - the good kind.
Posted by: larry smith | March 18, 2008 at 07:44 PM