Biofuels food for thought

That's the issue i suppose. Then you get other issues such as land clearing which leads to erosion, poor soil, contributing to climate change and a host of other issues. These are new problems for the world and ones that need to be addressed on a global scale.

There is a big debate about clearing jungle to plant palms for oil as well.

This is an interesting issue that is often overlooked in the bio-fuel debate; the effect it will have on every day food crops. Earlier this year rises in the price of corn and sugar could be traced to speculative interests pushing the price of these commodities higher when the oil price increased shaprly.

Whilst the cost of bio-diesel to some extend currently reflects the cost of production and at times will be cheaper than oil based refined products, eventually what will happen is the price of the underlying crops used will start to reflect movements in the price of oil. That has the potential to erode any cost benefits over tradionally refined product, but more alarming should be the affect it has on staple food crops.

In a nuthell, we risk linking the price of basic food crops to the underlying price of oil. In a world whose demand for oil and refined petroleum products is increasing and supplies dwindling this may have severe consequences and needs to be addressed.

Its funny how we try to do something good for the world and it ends up making things worse. Reminds me of how email was going to make a paperless office, instead it doubled the consumption of paper because everyone printed out the emails! My conclusion is that the only way to seperate ourselves from oil would be to rebuild the economy based in the earths value. It looks as if this crop/oil price link is a bad result of trying to overcome oil while still relying heavily on it. I think we should also rethink the type of crops we use as the whole palm oil think north of us is having very bad effects and in Australia there are some crops like mustard seed which does not need water (much), is good for oil, and it grows in places we dont want to grow eating crops in.