Stuart Staniford takes a point I've read recently in Vernon Coleman's "Oil Apocalypse", about biofuels threatening food supplies for the world's poor, and extrapolates frighteningly:
... both oil and cereals are global commodity markets. If it's profitable to make food into fuel in the US, even without a subsidy, then it's profitable elsewhere also - possibly more so given lower labor costs. So the basic growth dynamics are the same. The infection just hasn't got as strong a grip on the whole globe yet, but it's growing at similar rates.
... I expect oil prices to increase in the medium term, though certainly they could go down in the short-term if the credit crunch affects the global economy enough.
... When we have a bidding war between the gas tanks of the roughly one billion middle class people on the planet, and the dinner tables of the poor, where does that reach equilibrium?
... We noted earlier that according to the UN about 800 million people are unable to meet minimal dietary energy requirements. That is 12% of the world population. [...] we can estimate that a doubling in food prices over 2000 levels might bring 30% or so of the global population below the level of minimal dietary energy requirements, and a quadrupling of food prices over 2000 levels might bring 60% or so of the global population into that situation.
4 comments:
"If it's profitable to make food into fuel in the US, even without a subsidy..."; but it isn't, is it? That's why there's a subsidy.
The best comment I've seen on the US ethanol madness was along the lines of "We're going to take the last foot of good topsoil in the midwest and put it in our gas tanks."
Coleman quotes two investigations that show corn ethanol takes a lot more energy to make than it yields as a fuel.
... but as Staniford speculates, it's possible that the relatively low cost of land and labour in some other countries could stimulate profitable biofuel production there.
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