Mouthpiece - Some food for thought amid the clamour for biofuels

There's not enough land to produce food and fuel, says Colin Clark

ONCE hailed as a possible saviour for an energy guzzling world, biofuels have now become hugely contentious. Some politicians and academics see an increased usage of biofuels as the best way to provide sustainable energy for future generations. Some think it is using up land that is vital for food production and needs to be stopped, or scaled back at the very least.

The overriding concern is there is not enough productive land to produce both food for the rising world population and biofuels to meet increasing demand for energy. According to the Gallagher Review, which was published last week and recommended that the UK Government slow its biofuels programme, there will be enough productive land to meet the demand for both food and fuel until 2020. What will happen after then cannot be determined at present, but to give an indication of how quickly land use is changing, at present crops grown for biofuel occupy one per cent of cropland. By 2020, the Gallagher Review estimates that rising demand for biofuel and food for a growing world population will increase demand for cropland by as much as 44 per cent.

These figures are enough to cause shock in a world coming to terms with the reality of food rioting. Who would have thought that Europeans would be worried about food shortages, when only a decade ago, the European Union's main concern was how to reduce the butter and beef mountains, milk and wine lakes? For decades, the EC and then EU paid out over half of its total budget to farmers to encourage them to grow certain food crops. Now the very same people are incentivising the growth of biofuels instead.

In an industry squeezed by the bargaining power of supermarkets and the competition of cheap foodstuffs from abroad, our farmers may well be forgiven for turning their land over to biofuel production.

However, as the balance between the need for food and fuel is now so fine, it should be market forces, not subsidies, which determine which crops are grown. If the distortion to the market caused by subsidies and the buying power of a small group of powerful purchasers are reduced that would benefit both farmers and consumers.

One should not assume that biofuels in their current form are the only types of biofuels that will ever exist. Work is already under way to create biofuel from algae and waste products, a seemingly workable alternative.

There is no doubt that we are facing a shortage of land if we want to feed the ever-growing number of mouths and produce biofuels as a sustainable energy source to see us into the future. All parties must work together to find a solution because if we do nothing it will affect our children much more than it will affect ourselves.

Colin Clark is a partner at Pagan Osborne and specialist in agricultural law