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: Video Shows How Coskata’s Next-Gen Flex Ethanol is Made
- » 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.
If Biofuels are causing food prices to rise in the grocery stores then they need to find something else!
Jiff
http://www.privacy.de.tc
The article first highlights the need for higher food-per-hectare efficiency and then concludes that there should be less competition between food and bioenergy.
As an economist I’d like to reply: We need MORE competition, because competition is the driver behind efficiency. I do not say that we have flawless markets (far from it, indeed) and that there should be no concerted efforts, but giving food producers an edge beyond a less distorted market will lead to less efficiency in agricultural production.
No has addressed the meat issue either. If the trillions of calories of vegetation that are used to feed cattle fed humans every year we could “save” a huge mount of energy. I love a good steak but I would be willing to eat vegetarian at lunch everyday to add to the pool. Who will make that little change with me?
Biofuels are not here to stay. The biofuel “solution” would cause more economic problems than it could ever hope to solve. The fuel burns less efficiently than regular gas and the processing requires so much oil and resources that it just plain old doesn’t make sense. After the election, all government subsidies for biofuels will slowly melt away…republican or democrat.
Other alternatives like electric and hydrogen power should get the research grants and biofuel development should be put down.
Larry larry larry.. You talk about ignorance…boy oh boy. Let’s talk about simple economics of the equilibrium of demand and supply. There is a pre-determined amount of farm land in the United States. If the demand for Corn doubles (say to meet the heightened demand for biofuel due to misguided government subsidies), then yes farmers will plant corn to keep up with the current cash crop. If a farmer moves away from let’s say…wheat to corn, then the wheat market takes that hit. That’s why beef and milk prices have sky-rocketed. Cows need to eat…the price of their feed goes up due to lowered supply….food prices rise and people suffer.
It’s all give and take and biofuels absolutely do cause this very significant problem.
Jack Herer has a $100,000 dollar challenge for any of you smart guys who want to make some money. All you have to do is prove him wrong on the advantages of Hemp as a biofuel. It grows up to 20 feet high and is loaded with cellulose. Grows without fertilizers and pesticides. Check it out Jackherer.com, scroll down to the middle of the page. Good luck making some money!
just rework the hole paying farmers not to grow stuff that will bring 36 million acres of farm land back on into action and save us tax payers 1.6 billion dollars. Give the manufacturing of bio-fuel a tax break. Obviously we would need to do something to help the farmers work those 36 million acres but I doubt it will cost 1.6 billion bucks a year (about $44.45 an acre). I don’t know about ya’ll but I would much rather my money go back into the US economy whenever I fill up my car than over the the middle east (I don’t like them… they try and kill me)
Where I got some facts from
http://www.cascadepolicy.org/2005/10/14/freedom-fuel-how-and-why-biodiesel-policy-should-reflect-freedom/
I really don’t understand why the bio-fuel discussion focuses on food crops. We can’t eat the most productive oil producing (for diesel) and bio-mass (for alcohols) crops. The areas that produce them aren’t much good for food crops.
Of course we already pay farming companies to leave land fallow because we can produce far more than we can eat or profitably ship abroad. Higher prices for fuel usage of a crop (i.e. corn) vs. food usage is what will cause food shortages and run up those prices. Growing corn and wheat for food and plants like rapeweed or kudzu for fuel makes more sense.
The unproven bio-tech argument has mostly to do with efficiency and scalability. Which methods will produce the greatest efficiency at tens of millions of gallons per month production levels? That’s not something that needs to be decided now. The companies that will invest in and build the production infrastructure can require the proprietary details of the processes they’ll consider. They’ll sign NDAs and then evaluate the most promising technology. Any bio-tech startup company that doesn’t want to play can try to raise their own production money.
Right now I’m not concerned with fuel production in the third world. Establishing a sustainable fuel production infrastructure that eliminates imported fuel in the US is. That alone will free up enough petro-fuel and depress its price enough to allow the third world to develop prosperous high-energy economies. (Leave aside for now political and human considerations like dictators and greed celebrating cultures. Different problem. Different solutions.) Those economies will then be able to quickly adopt whatever methods prove to work best in North America, Europe, and Japan.
Why is there an argument between GMO and traditional improvements, we can and must do both. Places such as North America and Europe are pretty much maxed out on traditional improvements, and future improvements are more likely to come from GMO. In the third world, traditional improvements such as the use of fertilizer, crop rotation, artificial irrigation and pesticides can make a massive increase in output. Thus we’ll see developed countries go more towards the GMO route, and developing countries improve their water supply and do more traditional things because there is not a one size fits all solution.
It takes a pretty lame-brained American animal to turn food into fuel, proof; George Bush and McCain did it! while other crops provide more fuel per acre on poor, semi-arable land! Hemp, not dope, asshole, hemp! a similar plant but without THC, can provide edible oil, fiber and a multitude of useful byproducts to mankind and, but for a crooked and dishonest law passed in the 1930’s to protect old timey cotton farmers, grows wild here in the U.S. and Canada. The Canadians and Chinese have caught on to this, and are marketing hemp and its products as we speak! All we have to do is to plant the poorer ground, that will not grow food, to hemp, and harvest it for all the good we can get out of it! Real growth, real worth, real riches, all at home! Change the hemp laws and change the now very grim American economic picture! Don’t change? Die in abject poverty of the Great Depression!