RARELY has public perception of an issue reversed so completely so quickly.
Only a couple of years ago biofuel was the belle of the ball, a morally correct option to use agricultural surplus capacity to create an environmentally cleaner fuel that helped offset rising oil costs.
Now it is the wicked stepsister, a polluting, immoral waste that takes food from the mouths of the poor.
Jean Ziegler, United Nations special rapporteur for the right to food, went so far as to call biofuel, especially corn-based ethanol, a “crime against humanity.”
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It is another case of a simplistic solution to complex problems being over hyped and then over criticized.
Criticism of biofuel has been growing for a while, mainly centring on its environmental credentials. But it hit the front page once it became associated with grain scarcity and rising food costs.
North Americans may frown at their grocery bill, but the real pain is felt in poor countries. Protests against the rising cost of food are becoming common and there have even been riots in Egypt and Haiti.
But the reasons for rising food costs go far beyond biofuel development to a widespread reckless indifference about agriculture, farmers and food production.
The economic success of Asia and other parts of the Third World has lifted many millions from poverty, allowing them to increase the amount of protein and meat in their diets, creating demand for feed grain and oilseeds.
This prompted Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to say, “Food is expensive because the world wasn’t prepared to see millions of Chinese, Indians, Africans, Brazilians and Latin Americans eat.”
The world wasn’t prepared because it ignored moribund rice and wheat yields. It ignored inadequate farm income that gave little incentive to invest in new technology. It ignored the shrinking agricultural land base, lost to urban and industrial encroachment.
Years before biofuel became a significant consumer of grain, world grain production struggled to keep pace with demand and stocks fell. Even as historically low grain prices discouraged production, an estimated 820 million people in developing countries were undernourished. Clearly, low grain prices don’t end hunger.
Then came soaring energy prices, adding costs at every stage of production, transport, processing and retailing, often making a greater contribution to rising food costs than high grain prices.
Booming international trade caused ocean freight rates to nearly double.
Chronic under production globally was made worse by bad weather in several regions, particularly Australia, slashing yields.
And then there is biofuel.
In the United States, where biofuel was a guaranteed vote getter in the lightly populated but politically important Midwest farm states, government policy turbocharged ethanol development with a range of federal and state subsidies and mandates so lucrative that plants could boast of paying off all their construction costs in just a couple of years.
With 30 percent of American corn now being processed into ethanol, accusations about taking food from the poor to fill the gas tanks of the rich get good news play even if it’s inaccurate.
Biofuel can’t replace conventional fuels but it has a place in an energy hungry world.
Governments should help this fledgling industry get started and invest in research into more efficient production processes and ways to make ethanol from non-food feedstocks.
Canada’s incentives have largely followed this model. To do more, sparking a speculative ethanol boom like that in the United States, hurts the livestock industry and causes more harm than good.
But biofuel is a sideshow to the real problem of hunger. We must not be distracted from the more important task of helping to revive Third World agriculture.
The World Bank recently reported that even with high grain prices, poor farmers in developing countries are prevented from increasing yields because of the soaring cost of inputs. Poor farmers need help to pay for inputs and to adopt new technology to increase yields.
Governments and development agencies must recognize that farmers and food production are the foundation upon which society is based, not a relic to be stepped over on the way to economic progress. And government policy must be focused on eradicating poverty so people can afford food.
The goal should not be the growth and supply of cheap affordable grain, but to have prosperous citizens who can afford reasonably priced food.
Bruce Dyck, Terry Fries, Barb Glen, D’Arce McMillan and Ken Zacharias collaborate in the writing of Western Producer editorials.
