This year, we have seen soaring food prices and world food riots. Global warming and increased demand are boosting the cost of our daily bread, as is biofuel production. Once again, President Bush has come down on the wrong side of an environmental issue: his misguided subsidizing of American ethanol production has helped drive up grain prices. Biofuel is a disaster-in-the-works when it comes to feeding the planet. If produced on a large scale from food crops, biofuel will keep transportation costs down for the rich, while many of the planet's poor starve.
Biofuel has a positive role to play, but it will come from its production from agricultural and food waste or from renewable native grasses in areas that are not environmentally sensitive (see Gas, Grass Or...Corn: Nobody Rides For Free).
Contrary to the spin of biofuel advocates like President Bush or Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, biofuel will indeed hasten the destruction of the Amazon rain forest and Brazil's Cerrado (savanna region), along with biodiversity hotspots in other countries. These areas are already being developed rapidly for agricultural production. Biofuel will directly burn up more land there; it will also shift other agriculture and ranching into the rain forest when food crops elsewhere are used to produce ethanol and biodiesel. (See Biofuel Could Eat Brazil's Savannas & Deforest the Amazon).
To be fair, biofuel has its environmental advocates who believe it will help in the fight against global warming. Yet, the destruction of rain forests to produce biofuel will not aid the cause, nor will ethanol production from energy-inefficient crops such as corn. George Soros, Steven Bing, Ron Burkle, Steve Case and other green-minded entrepreneurs who have invested in biofuel production in the Cerrado or Amazon need to re-evaluate the consequences of their actions. Making biofuel (ethanol or biodiesel) from corn, soy, sugar cane, palm oil and other food crops is not a viable long-term solution for our energy needs, nor even an acceptable stop-gap measure.