Are biofuels the answer to soaring energy costs and concerns about global warming? Michael Bennettsupports the notion, but Colin Rocheopposes
YES:What's needed is robust policies to maximise use of home produced biofuels such as pure plant oil from rape seed, writes Michael Bennett
NOW THAT Green Party Minister Eamon Ryan has decided to drop the targets of 5.75 per cent inclusion of biofuels in transport fuels, it raises the question as to what part biofuels can play in confronting our almost total dependence on imported fossil fuels and in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.
The real reason these targets were dropped was that the Government had failed to introduce policies that would facilitate the achieving of these targets. The questionable schemes in place were only introduced under threat of court action by the European Union.
The excuse used for the decision to drop the targets, that they wish to facilitate the food-versus-fuel debate, was scraping the barrel. The food versus fuel debate is futile and the product of intellectually lazy minds.
The debates that should be taking place are how the world can feed itself without oil and how the developed world can curtail its appetite for fossil fuels and thereby stop polluting the planet with greenhouse gases.
These two issues would converge not on food versus fuel, but on use of the greatest resources on the planet, land, water and oil, and who will carry the greatest burden if we fail to deal with climate change. It will not be developed world citizens who may be inconvenienced somewhat, but the "poorest of the poor" whose very lives will be threatened.
For years we have been told dumping subsidised food surpluses on world markets was undermining agricultural production in developing countries, and contributing to world hunger. I had a lot of sympathy with that argument. Now that world food markets have changed and the dumping of food surpluses on third world markets has been curtailed, farmers are again being blamed for third world hunger.
Can both arguments be correct? While the developed world can and must help, the only people who can solve the issue of hunger in Africa are Africans, in Africa. Food aid to the developing world may have its place during natural disasters, but it is not a sustainable solution and can be counterproductive.
The increase in recent times of the cost of all traded commodities, including food, came at a time when the world is trying to deal with the impacts of fossil fuel usage and the rise in greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.
To lay the blame for the current increase in food prices on a reversion back to traditional sources of energy - namely biofuels - is a simplistic, lazy, knee-jerk reaction and shows a total lack of understanding of how commodity markets work. The 30-year downward trend in real food prices has been halted by a combination of factors including:
Higher cost of production due to higher cost of energy, fertilisers and crop protection products;
Reduction in world carryover of food stocks in the last number of years;
Change of diet and the increase in overall demand in India and China;
Climatic conditions in major food exporting regions, drought in the Ukraine and Australia, floods in the USA;
Export taxes on food in countries such as Argentina, Ukraine and India;
Speculation in all commodities including food; and
Collapse of food production in southern Africa as a result of political corruption.
A manifestation of these influences is the disappearance of the food mountains and lakes and the suspension, this year, of the set-aside on EU farmland. When inflation is taken into consideration, maize, wheat, soybeans and sugar are, even now, at less than 50 per cent of 1974 prices.
Recent commodity price increases have made it economic to cultivate marginal land and bring it back into production.
Why should the debate be just food versus fuel? Why not food v timber, fibre crops, coffee, tea, alcohol, drugs, flowers etc? What about golf courses, race courses, stud farms, airports and even public parks? All these use land that could be used to produce food.
If we must have a debate it should be about land use and food waste. Some 6.7 million tonnes or 31 per cent of all food purchased annually in the UK is dumped.
Ireland is one of the most dependent countries in Europe, importing almost all our energy, while we export 80 per cent of our agricultural production. Therein lies the problem and the solution. Without effective policies, the biofuels targets were irrelevant.
What is needed, in the interest of fuel security, environment and economy, is robust policies to maximise use of home produced biofuels, and the best one for Ireland is pure plant oil (PPO) made from rape seed.
The only input is rape seed grown sustainably in Ireland and electricity (hopefully renewable) and the only output is PPO, a 100 per cent renewable diesel replacement. The only by-product is a high protein animal feed, the perfect replacement for imported soybeans.
Think globally, act locally.
Michael McBennett is treasurer of South Dublin Chamber of Commerce, chairman of the National Offshore Wind Association and is a farmer and oil seed processor
NO:Promotion of biofuels has pushed up food prices and production will hurt the world's poor without impacting sufficiently on CO2 emissions, writes Colin Roche
BIOFUELS PROVIDE neither a solution to soaring energy costs nor to concerns about global warming. Instead, they are costing both ourselves and the poor dearly.
Climate change is already with us, and urgent action is required to tackle it. However, the justification for the use of biofuels as a solution has in recent months taken a hammering.
A paper published this March in the journal Science pointed out that when you include the carbon emissions associated with changing the use of land - eg replacing rainforest with biofuels plantations - the rationale for using biofuels to combat climate change evaporates.
Biofuel production, of the scale currently envisaged, may in fact increase emissions of greenhouse gases rather than decrease them, at least in the timeframe required for us to prevent dangerous climate change.
The European Union's Renewable Energy Directive, for example, currently under discussion in the European Parliament, sets a target of 10 per cent of transport fuel to come from biofuels by 2020. This would require not just large scale domestic production of biofuels, such as rapeseed oil, but also the importation of huge amounts of vegetable oils - potentially leading to the release of as much as 3.1 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, a whole 46 times the amount the European Commission estimates will be saved by this biofuel strategy.
The argument that biofuels will promote energy security doesn't stand up either. Even if we converted all carbohydrates, grains and corns in the world into ethanol, this would still only provide enough fuel to replace 40 per cent of global petrol consumption. Replacing fuel with biofuel is patently unrealistic.
There's simply no way of getting round the need to cut consumption and use other more sustainable methods of energy production.
What's more, biofuels are also costly. Rich countries already spend $15 billion per annum supporting the industry. At current rates the EU may end up by 2020 paying €22 billion a year subsidising the biofuel industry.
This might be justified if there were sufficient carbon savings. However, the carbon benefits are elusive, if not absent, at very large scales. Furthermore, it's much more expensive than other measures we could be putting in place to tackle climate change.
Increased vehicle efficiency standards, to reduce emissions, of a kind recently rejected by the EU under pressure from the transport lobby would likely have cost €19 per tonne. One estimate puts the cost of carbon saved from rapeseed biodiesel at €600 per tonne.
However costly this may be, the greatest cost is being borne by people in the developing world. A hundred million people have already been pushed into poverty as a result of higher food prices - in part driven by increased demand for biofuels.
In just three years the price of food has nearly doubled. A major contributor to this increase has been the large-scale production of biofuels from food crops. According to the International Food Policy Research Institute, a respected Washington-based think tank, 30 per cent of the rise in grain prices is as a result of the demand to turn crops into biofuels. A recent leaked World Bank report says that it could be twice that. The result is higher food bills forcing tens of millions of people into poverty and hunger.
Of course world hunger existed before biofuels and the recent price crisis. Every year over 800 million people go hungry even though there is more than enough food in the world to go round. But biofuels are undoubtedly a key cause of the recent increase in world food prices which has pushed yet further millions more into poverty.
It will be argued that not all biofuels are the same. True. It would be wrong to completely dismiss the role that biofuels may have in the future in tackling energy and climate change problems. Small-scale, localised energy production in developing countries is one promising avenue, and certainly production of biofuels from waste, as is already happening in Ireland, appears to be an opportunity we should not forsake. Technological development may indeed make these more attractive options in the future. But choosing to boost the large-scale production of biofuels to feed the unending appetite for cars now appears both irresponsible and dangerous.
An urgent revision of biofuels policies around the world is now required, including dropping the EU target of 10 per cent use by 2010. The Minister for Energy Eamon Ryan has already taken a welcome step by dropping the existing target for 5.75 per cent of transport fuel to come from biofuels by 2010. He should now urge his colleagues in Europe to go further.
Biofuels then offer neither a solution to climate change nor higher energy prices and are damaging the lives of millions of people. Biofuels may provide some answers in the future, but for the present, encouraging their mass production would be simply reckless.
The lives of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our world are at risk.
Colin Roche is Oxfam Ireland's policy and advocacy co-ordinator