We must shift our perspective on biofuel production

DON HOPPS
Last updated: August 6th, 2008 01:26 AM (PDT)

Now its impact on food prices threatens to wash out public investments in this “future” of energy. The simmering argument over the relation of food prices to the use of food crops for biofuels boiled over at the recent G8 summit. The United States attempted to protect its shaky pro-biofuels position by deep-sixing a recent World Bank study attributing 75 percent of the rise in food prices to the diversion of food crops to biofuel production.

Unfortunately this controversy missed the point, dealing with symptoms rather than causes.

Our entire economic paradigm counts natural resources as economic externalities. The use of soil and water is not considered a cost, hence in economic logic we are free to continue to exploit these resources at will. Such exploitation is not sustainable. Inevitably, we deplete the resource to the point where the costs of extraction or substitutes rise. This is what has happened with oil and is now happening with food.

Just five months ago, the food controversy of the day was that there was too much cheap corn. The top CNN story line of Feb. 2, 2008, was that hundreds of thousands of Mexican farmers were protesting the fact that cheap U.S. corn was undermining local production. These protests were the culmination of years of international complaints around U.S. farm subsidies, overproduction and unfair competition. The artificially created global cornucopia of cheap food has been destroying the capacity of local areas to feed themselves.

In this context, the recent rise in food prices could be seen as a good thing, redressing the imbalance in the relation of food prices to inflation.

Biofuel and food production are inextricably linked in our embrace of corn-based ethanol. We produce corn in a monoculture highly dependent on petroleum and natural gas fertilizers, making it costly in terms of energy and the environment. The concentration required by global markets only adds to fuel consumption and environmental degradation. And we went one step further. We modeled the production of biofuels on the same unsustainable “industrial” model we use for agricultural production. Ironically, the biofuel revolution has been trapped in the very problem it was meant to resolve.

The rise and fall of biofuels is a classic example of good intentions, bad policy and ugly greed. The way out is simple but hard to travel: We must abandon the use of food crops to produce biofuels.

We are helped by the fact that biofuels can be produced from waste. But viability requires all the products of the production process – from heat to residual sludge – be used. Moreover, to reduce transportation, biofuels must be tailored to local resources and markets. These changes can only happen if we stop subsidizing mass-volume production and start supporting high-value production.

In short, economic necessity demands biofuel production must model the sustainable values it is supposed to serve.

These changes in our consumer habits and public policy can only come from a paradigm shift. Our economic measures must catch up with moral imperatives, exchanging the global scale for the human scale and valuing feeding people rather than fueling our driving mania.

Don Hopps is consulting director for the Institute for Washington’s Future, a nonprofit organization that advocates for sustainable energy and agriculture.

Originally published: August 6th, 2008 01:26 AM (PDT)