Biofuels are Here To Stay: What To Do About Food Supply?
Editor’s Note: I’m in Houston, TX, this week, celebrating the International Year of the Planet by posting on topics covered at the first ever joint meeting between the American societies of Soil Science, Geology, Crop Science and Agronomy. With a significant focus on biofuels, this conference should be rife with interesting materials.
In a wide-ranging session on Tuesday dealing with global biofuel, food security and poverty issues, there was plenty for the presenters to disagree about — but the one thing they could all concur on was that the biofuel genie is out of the bottle and he’s here to stay.
Several times during the session the presenters highlighted the fact that biofuels have finally brought an inherent value to agriculture that was previously missing. This, more than anything else, is why biofuels are not going to go away. Up to now, the lack of agricultural value has caused a deep deficiency in the level of funding and investment that governments worldwide have provided for their agricultural security and infrastructure.
- » See also: The Biofuel Industry – No Money, No Respect
- » Get Gas 2.0 by RSS or sign up by email.
As pointed out by Dr. Kenneth Cassman, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, energy and food consumption are linked to human wealth. As a society’s wealth increases, its energy consumption rises far more quickly than its food consumption - in fact, food consumption eventually plateaus because people can only fit so much into their stomachs. This very fact is leading to a revolution — the result of which will be that, in the future, we will view fuel as a more important outcome from growing crops than food.
So, if biofuels are here to stay, how can the global community prevent millions of people from falling into famine due to competition of food land with biofuel land when biofuel land turns out to be more profitable? Several ideas were floated, but the most agreed upon solution was that crop yields need to be drastically improved to pack more food value into the same amount of land — otherwise, the amount of crop land needed to feed the world will lead to an environmental catastrophe of its own.
The argument came down to a major difference between those that think the only answer is to genetically engineer our way out of the problem and those that think the simpler and better solution would be to provide farmers with the education, equipment and strategies to bring their currently low yields up to the maximum yield possible without spending huge amounts of resources on research into genetic modification.
It was a clear and stark difference: those in the genetic engineering corner think that the panacea of GMOs can provide all of the above: higher yields, drought resistance, pest resistance, and crop nutrient use improvements. But those in the non-GMO corner are skeptical of these claims, and feel that the money currently sunk into genetic engineering research might be being wasted.
The trick, the non-GMO group says, will be to simultaneously increase yield and reduce the environmental impact of farming. It’s very easy to increase one at the expense of the other, but turns out to be very hard to find ways to do both together — and without a huge diversion of money from the current glut the biotech industry is receiving to more traditional sorts of agricultural research, that goal may be damn near impossible to reach.
Dr. Cassman’s closing points sum it up rather perfectly:
“For those of you that do think that genetic engineering is going to deliver on many of these promises — quantum leaps in yield, drought tolerance, nutrient use efficiency — I feel it’s a lot like the problems we face in the world financial system today. There’s no transparency.”
“If [the genetic engineering boom] had happened 30 years ago, much of the information underpinning those claims would be in the public domain. We’d be able to look at it, and challenge it and see if it’s real.”
“We’re in a very dangerous system now where the policy makers believe [what the biotech companies say] and then change what they fund and how they invest research dollars nationally and globally [to divert money to the biotech industry]. The end result is that these [biotech] companies are telling them what they have in the pipeline and the policy makers don’t realize that what [these companies] are selling is seed, and they have no responsibility to publish the underpinning science.”
“We’ve got to be very careful here as a global community. We have such a great potential now to harness the value that biofuels have brought to agriculture. All of our careers we have fought because agriculture has no value, and countries were not investing in it because there was no value in it. The world bank told you to build a road to a resort on a beach, don’t build a road to an agricultural market inland because our financial analysis tells us it’s not worth it.
“We finally have a chance for true agricultural value, we have got to get it right this time.”
Regardless of how we get there, we must plan to meet the needs of 9 billion people who are much wealthier and have a much higher demand for energy than food.
The final point that all participants agreed on was that our current funding portfolio will not get us there. There has got to be a global concerted effort by all economic superpowers to increase yield and reduce competition between biofuels and food by funding research that has, for a long time, been virtually ignored.
Panelists participating in the discussions were: Dr. Kenneth Cassman, Dr. Adam Liska, Dr. Martin Bohn, Dr. Hernán Ceballos, Dr. Peter Hazell, Dr. David Zilberman, Dr. Wilfred Vermerris, and Dr. Mark Winslow.
Other Posts From the Joint Meeting in Houston:
- How Much Oil is Actually Left On This Planet? Should We Care?
- Pro-Poor Biofuel Crops: Sweet Sorghum and Cassava
- Biofuels And Security: Shedding My Western-Centric Worldview (Opinion)
Image Credit: existentist’s Flickr photostream under a Creative Commons license.
this article deals with the very aspect of our food demands as well as the economy crisis.
There exists plenty of land to sustain the competing demands of food and bio-fuel. The problems seen in the past couple of years are a result of government mandates and the lag that occurs as any industry responds to massive demand.
Adam, this is a reply to your post on gm-volt.com. You wrote:
” Hello, I am a writer for http://www.gas2.org and one of my readers had a question that I would like to follow up on. There are millions of urban dwellers, like my reader who lives in a 3rd floor condo walk up, that do not have access to an outside electrical outlet.
What options do these people have in re-charging the volt? ”
I have an idea. An arm which extends automatically from the car to the front right corner, finds a special type of socket and plugs in, then recharges (or sells back to the grid) while acting as your ‘energy’ agent on your behalf via interacting with a neutral cooperative.
More detail:
The socket:
Has 2 or so infrared beacons and wireless (infrared) TCP/IP connectivity. When the car connects to the plug it does a DHCP request and becomes a firewalled node on the internet. Designed to handle higher current and voltage than the chevy volt would need, incase capacitor or other quick charging technologies come to market and incase a semi-truck of the future wishes to charge from the socket.
The arm & plug:
A standard distance and area away from the front right corner of all vehicles, including semi-trucks, will be determined. A mechanical arm will be designed for a car like the volt, and mounted in a way where the arm can extend towards that specified area where a socket is expected to be. Via infrared (or other means) it will identify the socket’s location and determine the correct angle to insert the plug into the socket. It will then establish communications with the socket.
The cooperative:
A cooperative similar to the business model of Visa will be a non profit and neutral energy trading company. It taxes transactions to fund itself and perhaps expansion of the socket installations nationwide.
How it would work:
The car would park in a parking space, or their own garage, or in a parking lot, etc. The car would be programmed to determine automatically if it should charge, or even sell back its energy. The driver could override, otherwise the car would automatically extend the arm using the infrared beacon of the socket to find it and insert at a correct angle. The car would become a node on the internet and contact the owner of the socket and the cooperative. If electricity is to be purchased the car could use some credits available from when it previously sold (or loaned) electricity to ‘the grid’. Either way, the car will get its electricity at an automatically negotiated price and agreement.
The car owner and utility companies could ‘trade’ electricity. The car could gave back 7 units of electricity during peak hours, and the electricity company would give them 10 units of electricity that night.
Battery leases involving the power companies could include sharing provisions which are accomplished by the network connection and automatic charging. If you don’t want to pay for the full cost of your battery, perhaps you could share the battery with a utility company.
The car would be your ‘energy’ agent and act on your behalf, the cooperative would neutrally make it happen the way visa makes transactions happen. If your car knows your driving a long distance, it could make wise decisions to lower cost and perhaps coordinate where you stop and eat. Perhaps energy credits could be traded for gasoline.
If curbs were rebuilt, with wiring and sockets, you could charge on the street.
If your apartment manager needs to be motivated to wire up his place, some of the cost could be covered by the cooperative via a tax on some/all transactions. The system would be setup to feed itself in order to reach critical mass, and government tax incentives would be involved.
death to oil - http://www.oiljihad.org
I send to me that one part of plant should be used for food and other parts should be use for fuel. Wheat for example. The seeds are use for food. The straw can be used for biofuels. killing two brids with one stone.
Micheal,
This was one topic discussed during the session. The type of crops you’re talking about are referred to as “Pro-poor” energy crops. I’ll be posting an article on this topic in the next few days because it warrants further attention.
Although I applaud your thinking, making cellulosic ethanol is something that will be out of the reach of most developing countries, so crops like wheat won’t work to kill two birds with one stone. There are other crops, however, that produce food, fermentable sugars, livestock feed, and burnable biomass all at the same time - hence can use traditional means to produce ethanol (straight fermentation of the sugars). I’ll be covering a couple of the most promising of those in the upcoming post.
This is such a lame discussion. The percieved problem does not exist.
Ethanol, bio-diesel, methane, bio-butanol, hundreds of food ingredients, thousands of industrial chemicals, plastics and many various animal feeds are all co-products derived from corn.
American Agriculture is producing all the corn based food, pharmaceutical, chemical and feed ingredients that the world markets will bear. We can not produce more food, chemicals or feed without collapsing the corn based markets, just like the real estate market crashed.
If the markets all double, we will simply double the production of corn. Anyone that tells you we can not do so is ignorant of the basic facts of American Agriculture.
The next high protein food ingredient, pharmaceutical, industrial chemical and animal food source that will have to crowd its way into the world economy is green algae cake, a co-product of algae oil production. To be usable as a high protein food and feed product it needs to be grown in a non-sewage medium, as millions of tons will be. It will compete with corn as a high protein feedstock for many applications
Our problem in America is always growing too much food, never a shortage of food. That will not change for a very long time, if ever.
larry hagedon
i’m sorry.. but biofuels are stupid… save the planet by cutting down the trees & …making gas out of them? how about some good alternative power sources instead? or at least.. more cars that run on used disgusting fryer grease that no one wants to touch to begin with. or in short- there’s gotta be better ideas out there than this…
Since cars will be running on food, perhaps the biotech engineers will find a way for humans to run on petroleum.
@web, it isnt about cutting down *trees*, its crops that grow annualy
“i’m sorry.. but biofuels are stupid… save the planet by cutting down the trees & …making gas out of them? how about some good alternative power sources instead?”
ok, perhaps not stupid, but web’s comment raises a very valid point..