Fuel for your body or fuel for your car?

Would you like food on your table or fuel in your car? The choice seems simple enough but the question is likely to create great angst over the coming decades.
As oil supplies decline we are looking for alternatives to power our cars. Biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel are currently favoured. These fuels are created from plants that harvest the sun’s energy.
Biofuels seem attractive because they are renewable and are theoretically carbon neutral since the carbon dioxide emitted when they are burnt was only recently extracted from the atmosphere by the fuel crop.

The dilemma is that almost all of the crops currently used to produce biofuels – sugar cane, maize, sorghum, palm oil – are also grown as food crops. It’s a dilemma because of another problem - the world is heading into a food crisis.
Across the globe agricultural production is under pressure from land degradation, water shortages, urbanisation and increased costs of energy to power farm machinery and produce fertilisers. Climate change appears to be accelerating this trend. And there are 87 million extra people to feed every year. In seven of the last eight years the world has consumed more grain than it has produced and worldwide stocks are at record lows. Food commodity prices are rising – good news for farmers but food prices will inevitably rise.

In view of these chilling facts, diverting food crops to produce fuel for our cars seems like a pretty daft idea. But it won’t be the wealthy people who will be affected. They can continue to enjoy the luxury of driving while the world’s poorest people become increasingly malnourished.

The effects are already evident. Last year 20% of America’s maize crop went into ethanol production resulting in a worldwide hike in maze prices. In Mexico crowds have protested that the price of their staple diet – the tortilla – has quadrupled. And that ethanol met just 2% of America’s gasoline requirements.
Australia isn’t much better off. If we put the entire sugar cane crop into ethanol production it won’t even supply 10% of our fuel.

We must avoid competition between food and fuel crops, particularly for land and water. The best alternatives in Australia are fast growing native trees and shrubs that can be grown on marginal land with no irrigation. CSIRO proposed such a biofuel industry back in 1999 but it didn’t favour existing farmers. It’s time we resurrected that plan.

This was originally published in the Fraser Coast Chronicle on 2 October 2007.