Climate Change & Food Security [ PDF ]

In this Newsletter:

The Biofuel Debate: Food vs. Energy?

In a world increasingly concerned about national security and climate change, the appeal of biofuels [this article will focus on liquid biofuels produced as substitutes for gasoline or
diesel] has grown apace. Biofuels hold the potential to: (1) serve as a carbon neutral and renewable replacement for the transport fuels now responsible for 20% of CO2 emissions, (2) improve national energy security by reducing the US dependency on imported oil, and (3) create new opportunities to revitalize the agricultural sector.

In 2006, biofuel was touted as the “miracle” that would allow the US to solve its energy crisis and environmental challenges. The same year, in his State of the Union Address, President Bush firmly advocated a dramatic increase in production of biofuel, “to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.” This significant shift in policy culminated in December 2007 with the Energy Security Act of 2007 including a Renewable Fuel Standard setting a bold target of 7.5 billions gallons of biofuels by 2012 and at least 36 billion gallons by 20221.

However, during the first three months of 2008, the world experienced an unprecedented escalation of all major food commodity prices and consequent unrest and demonstrations in several Asian, African and Latin American countries. Because biofuels are either made from food/feed crops or directly compete with them for land use, water and other inputs, they have been blamed by many to be a principal cause for soaring grain prices.

Although biofuel production is likely contributing to the rise in commodity price, the nature and extent of its impact on food price is also complex and should not be overestimated. Biofuels have met about 30% of the growth in global demand for liquid transportation fuel over the past 3 years, but they still account for less that 2% of liquid transportation fuels and are produced on about 1% of the world’s agricultural lands. A combination of unstable government, skyrocketing oil price, and other weather related factors (drought, flooding etc.) have their share in the current turmoil. 2

Independent of their influence on the food crisis, biofuels have been facing scrutiny for other reasons. Comprehensive studies have recognized that biofuel performance assessments are less favorable once they are made to include not just their actual use in a vehicle, but also the emissions created during the complete life-cycle of that biofuel. When this realization is coupled with other economic and social concerns surrounding biofuel it becomes evident that our current rush to promote biofuel production may have been hasty.

The advent of second, third, or even fourth generation biofuel technologies should help to relieve biofuel production stress on the world food system as they are derived from non-food feedstock and can be grown on lands that are not suitable for agriculture.

Current 1st Generation Biofuels: Ethanol & Biodiesel

Ethanol is a type of alcohol made by fermenting the carbohydrates found in its feedstock, which can include grains, cereals, sugar and other starches. The world’s two largest producers of ethanol are currently the United States (corn-based) and Brazil (sugarcanebased), together producing 90% of the world’s ethanol used for fuel.3

The recent UN World Food Summit held in Rome on June 3-5 endorsed the booming Brazilian sugar-based ethanol market over the far less-efficient US corn-based model. Several reasons explain the relative advantage of Brazil’s sugarcane feedstock over corn.
First, the process of producing ethanol from sugar is simpler and about twice as efficient as the one used to convert corn into ethanol. Second, sugarcane is a more efficient feedstock, yielding an estimated 650-700 gallons of ethanol per acre compared with roughly 400 gallons per acre for corn5.

Despite the fact that ethanol has (by volume) only about two-thirds the energy content of gasoline, using sugarcane ethanol in cars instead of gasoline can cut greenhouse gas emissions 87% to 96%. Using ethanol produced from corn in the same way offers roughly a 10% to 20% reduction.

Biodiesel is a biodegradable, nontoxic and clean burning alternative fuel that can be produced from domestic and renewable resources such as oils or fats using transesterification, a process in which oils are mixed with sodium hydroxide and methanol (or ethanol) to produce biodiesel and glycerol.

Biodiesel contains no petroleum but can be used in compression-ignition (diesel) engines with few or no modifications either straight (B100) or blended with a petroleum based diesel. Today, biodiesel is most commonly made from rapeseed (Europe), soybean (US), palm (Asia), sunflower, and coconut. Because these oil-based feedstocks are denser than starch or cellulose, biodiesel can be viably produced even on a relatively small scale.

While the production of biodiesel may sound like a good idea in theory, in practice environmental damages have usually outweighed benefits -- especially in the case of the palm oil biodiesel being produced in Southeast Asia and Australia. In the process of clearing virgin land for this biofuel crop, the enormous reservoir of carbon, locked-up in forests, peatlands, and grasslands, is being released into the atmosphere. The draining of peatlands (which comprise at least 27% of Southeast Asian oil palm plantations) are causing massive greenhouse gas emissions due to rapid peat decomposition (approx. 70 to 100 tons of CO2 per hectare per year). Moreover, the drained peatlands are also susceptible to long burning fires that emit huge quantities of carbon dioxide.

Biofuel production affects food price and food security

The energy and agriculture markets are both connected as agriculture both consumes and produces energy. However, biofuel comprises only a small percentage of total energy markets, while energy costs make up a large portion of food costs. Much of the controversy surrounding biofuels originated as skyrocketing oil prices suddenly produced growing demand for biofuel feedstocks, which in turn acted to drive-up agricultural commodity prices. In assessing the problem from the perspective of food security, biofuel expansion and pursuit represent an especially menacing force as it affects three of the four factors that are commonly identified with food security: food availability, access, stability, and utilization.8

Biofuel development tends to jeopardize the availability of food if land, water and other productive resources are diverted from food production to biofuel production. Acreage planted as biofuel feedstock is expected to increase by 17% to 44% by 2020 according to the Gallagher Report published in July 2008.

Access to food depends largely on both purchasing power and physical access to food sources. While transportation costs and export restrictions have both played a large role in the current crisis, they have only a tangential relationship to the production of biofuel. A much stronger case can be made of biofuel’s impact on food access by considering how high commodity prices, buoyed partially by the rise in biofuel production, may have increased the income of some farmers, but diminished the buying power of many more people worldwide.

The rise of biofuel has affected food stability in two ways. First, it has contributed to the diminishment of worldwide grain reserves. In the past, there was not much that could profitably be done with grain surpluses, so it made sense to either give it away as food aid or store it for use in leaner times. Now, there is less incentive for maintaining grain reserves, since that material can instead be sold as biofuel feedstock. Without these stores to serve as a buffer, individual events, be they political or weather related, now have the potential to affect food availability and price. Additional forces of destabilization emerge from the fact that foodstocks, now being linked into the liquid fuels supply chain, are therefore subjected to some of the price volatility seen in those markets. Such predictions should be reason enough to accelerate the commercialization of next-generation biofuel.

The Future of Biofuels

The next generation biofuel holds the potential to sidestep many of the pitfalls of today’s technologies by avoiding the use of food crops as feedstock and using instead low-maintenance plant matter, such asagricultural residues, trees, and grasses.

Jatroha, a Better 1st Generation Feedstock

Besides the variety of already exploited biolipids in use to produce biodiesel, other more efficient feedstocks have appeared such as the Jatrophas Curcas, whose production is being explored in countries like India and the US. A native of tropical regions in the Americas, jatropha was brought to India by the Portuguese almost five centuries ago. Since then, jatropha has been thriving with more than 150 species in sub-tropical regions of the world.

This large shrub or small tree exhibits many qualities that could make it a desirable source of biofuel. To begin with, it is not a food source. It can be grown in areas of low rainfall and can therefore be used in reclaiming eroded areas in arid or semi arid regions. Its seeds have a high oil content (30%-40%) that can be readily used for making biodiesel. Jatropha is highly efficient and can yield up to two tons of biodiesel fuel per year per hectare, which amounts to 1,000 barrels of oil per year per square mile. It also requires modest amount of fertilizers and needs to be planted only every 50 years.

2nd Generation Biofuel, Cellulosic Ethanol

While ethanol is now produced from the starch contained in grains such as corn and grain sorghum, it can also be produced from cellulose. Cellulose is the main component of plant cell walls and is the most common organic compound on earth. It is more difficult to break down cellulose to convert it into usable sugars for ethanol production, but if science can find a way to carry-out that process cheaply on a large scale, the types and amount of available feedstock material would expand dramatically. Cellulosic ethanol can be produced from native crops including corn stalks, rice straw and wood chips or “energy crops” of fast-growing trees and grasses, or even a variety of materials now regarded as wastes requiring special disposal. Most of these feedstocks require fewer inputs and can often be grown on marginal lands. Therefore, over their entire life-cycle, they contribute less to GHG emissions and have fewer negative environmental impacts related to land use, water quality and availability, and biodiversity.

While it is certainly appealing to think that the production of cellulosic ethanol can be a panacea for many of our current problems, it is important to remember that the technology to produce cellulosic ethanol on commercial scales has yet to be developed. Additionally, while it is good that cellulosic feedstock can be grown on land not otherwise appropriate for growing food, producing enough biofuel to offset a significant portion of our liquid petro-fuels would still require the use of farmland and/or the clearing of vast areas of currently forested land.

Algae, the Third Generation Biofuel

One of the most robust organisms on Earth, algae has emerged as a very promising source of fuel. A slimy aquatic organism with a simple cellular structure and a lipid-rich composition, algae has the capacity to grow faster than any other plant on earth in a wide range of conditions including fresh or brackish water, saltwater ponds, enclosed spaces and other marginalized lands.

Algae’s body weight is naturally comprised of up to 60% oil, whereas oil-palm trees—currently the largest producer of oil to make biofuels— yield just about 20% of their weight in oil. Its very high yield of oil per acre of cultivation enables algae to produce up to 15,000 gallons of biodiesel per acre, compared to soybean’s 60 gallons, canola’s 150 gallons and palm oil’s 650 gallons. Recent research suggests that algae could supply enough fuel to meet all of America’s transportation needs in the form of biodiesel using a mere 0.2% of the nation’s land.

Another appeal to the use of algae as a source of biofuel can be found in the fact that it can be fertilized with human and agricultural waste. In this way algae not only makes use of a ubiquitous and free source of raw materials, but also helps us “clean-up” a waste source that would otherwise have to be handled independently.

This technology, however, remains in the development stage and still has some obstacles to overcome. For instance, algae production can be achieved with very limited input but it is vulnerable to contamination by other microorganisms or bacteria when cultivated in open ponds. Its productivity is also sensitive to fluctuations in temperature and sunlight. So far, these limitations have made cultivation costly and technology-intensive and led to the conception of photobioreactors, a device that houses and cultivates algae while providing a suitable environment for its growth, supplying light, nutrients, air, and heat to the culture.

Fourth Generation Biofuels

Scientists are now working to genetically construct microorganisms designed specifically to create biofuels. Unlike first through third generation biofuel producers, these bacteria would not need a “feedstock” of organic material to digest in order to produce fuel. Instead, powered only by sunlight or heat, they could produce useful, high-energy fuels directly from water and carbon dioxide.

Summer 2008 Climate Alert