Madam, - Oxfam has recently made an important statement on the European rush to biofuel. The EU is about to declare that 10 per cent of our fuel consumption should be provided by biofuel. Oxfam notes that this will have a devastating impact on world food supplies. I would like to emphasise two concerns, scientific and ethical.
First, is not clear that biofuels usually give out more energy than is consumed in their production and distribution (see, for example, Matthew Wald in Scientific American, January 2007). In some systems more energy is needed to produce biofuel than the biofuel contains. In others the capital cost of the new system may not be worth the yield.
Biofuel has a clean, green image, but in many situations nothing could be further from the truth. Biofuel production can be a "dirty" process. "Energy" crops such as maize and wheat require plenty of artificial fertiliser, which cannot be produced without consuming large amounts of energy and releasing large amounts of the potent greenhouse gases, the nitrogen oxides. This has been pointed out by Paul Crutzen in a recent paper in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Crutzen received the Nobel prize for his studies of the ozone layer.
Stavros Dimas, a member of the European Commission with responsibility for environmental matters, has asked us all to focus on making "credible and serious choices about biofuels". He notes that the EU target of 10 per cent of fuel consumption from biofuel would require us to divert 72 per cent of our arable land from food to fuel. This is unrealistic and the consequences are serious - we would buy either food or biofuel from abroad, cruelly distorting the global market in food.
So Europe's policy becomes an ethical matter. We simply cannot switch huge areas of land, on a global scale, from food to biofuel. Nearly 1 billion people suffer from malnutrition and 40,000 people die every day from its effects. This problem is going to be exacerbated by population growth, water depletion, global warming and the shift to meat and dairy products in the emerging economies. Exporting biofuel to Europe from the third world would make matters even worse.
There may be a place for biofuel in the use of biological wastes. Biogas can be produced from animal and domestic sewage, and in selected cases we can make bioethanol economically, for example from waste whey. There is a lot of research - by the Danish company Novozyme, for instance - on making bioethanol efficiently from straw and other cellulosic wastes. But the so-called second generation biofuels are still not proven.
As of now, large-scale biofuel production is a threat to world food supplies. It does not make good sense, either scientifically or economically. We need much more scientific research, especially on waste of all kinds, and we need to pay attention to it. We must put food before fuel. - Yours, etc,
DAVID McCONNELL, Co-Vice Chairman, EAGLES (European Action on Global Life Sciences), Barcelona, Spain.