Focus on biofuels aggravates food crisis worldwide

It always sounded like a great idea. Forget pumping limited amounts of petroleum products out of the ground to power our cars, trucks, boats and planes. Instead we could eventually grow our fuel, turning corn and sugarcane into ethanol and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the process.

Well, it seems like we can't do it without starving a good portion of the world. So now the question has become: eat or fuel?

In Haiti, five are dead after people, furious that the price of rice, flour and cooking oil has doubled in two weeks, rioted. Fuel prices jumped 15 per cent during the period. Despite the sacking of the prime minister and a reduction in rice prices, fighting remains unabated. And this isn't an isolated incident.

In Bangladesh, roughly 20,000 workers rioted over high food prices and low wages on Saturday, and Egypt saw two days of rioting last week after food prices doubled over the last year.

Earlier this year, 40 people died during inflation-related riots in Cameroon, and in Manila, President Gloria Arroyo said the country is planning to boost rice production even as the government threatened food hoarders with a lifetime in jail.

Other protests over the soaring price of food and fuel have bubbled up from Bolivia to Madagascar and Indonesia, and reports have surfaced that troops in Pakistan and Thailand are watching over fields and warehouses to prevent food thefts.

Aside from the individual national governments up in arms, the UN, the World Bank and the IMF have all come up with some pretty dire predictions about what will happen to poorer nations if fields are planted for fuel rather than food.

Jacques Diouf, the head of the UN food agency, said on Friday that soaring grain prices are a growing threat and Josette Sheeran, executive director of the UN World Food Programme, said skyrocketing fuel and grain prices were hampering the programme's ability to provide food aid to developing countries. Sheeran pointed to the growing demand for biofuels as a significant factor in rising cereal prices.

World Bank Group President Robert Zoellick wants increased focus on not only hunger, but how energy demands interact with food scarcity, and IMF President Dominique Strauss-Kahn said that some action will have to be taken if food prices continue to rise. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown wanted the discussion of the link between high food prices and biofuel production on the agenda of the G8 summit in Japan this July.

That heads of international organisations are sitting up and taking note isn't surprising, considering a report from the World Bank points out that globally, wheat prices jumped a massive 181 per cent over the past three years, and food prices were up 83 per cent.

According to a Reuters report, eight million hectares of corn, wheat and other crops have been switched from food to biofuel production since 2006, and countries from the Americas to Eastern Europe are setting their sugar cane, palm oil and soybean harvests aside to make biofuel.

Already about a quarter of the corn crop in the United States, and more than 50 per cent of Brazil's sugar cane crop is geared towards ethanol production, and with high oil prices biofuel-oriented crops are more financially appealing than food crops for poor farmers.

It doesn't look like the problem is going to go away anytime soon. With crude prices steadily set at more than $100 a barrel, it is going to be difficult to convince farmers that they should be producing crops that bring in less money but will feed the hungry.

- The writer is a freelance journalist based in Alaska, USA.