Biofuels in ecological perspective.

• Author: Ziegler, Alexis

What do George Bush, the conservative congress, most liberals, and quite a few radical environmentalists share in common? Enthusiastic support for biofuels. How could such diverse interests all support the same cause? Because they are all sold on the myth of progress. The proponents of biofuels promise an age of clean and renewable fuel. In its current form, the biofuels movement will only serve to shorten the time to our day of reckoning.

If we are going to feed human food to cars, we first need to ask how much surplus food production capacity we have. We get our food from a number of sources. Do you know when the world fish catch peaked? In the early 1980s.What about grain? Per capita production peaked in 1980s. Irrigated farmland produces a lion's share of human food. How is the supply of irrigated land holding up? Because of salinization, erosion, and other management issues, the global supply of irrigated farm land per capita has shrunk precipitously in the last several decades. Protecting the soil has been a long-term issue for humans. According to an estimate generated by the UN Environment Program, over the past 1000 years humans have permanently degraded more farmland than the sum total of that currently being farmed.

The final humbling fact is that, even though the US has the most productive agricultural system in the world, we are now a nation that teeters on the brink of agricultural debtorship. Our current agricultural balance of trade between imports and exports is nearly equal, and if current trends continue, the US will be a net importer of food within the next couple of years.

If the amount of irrigated farmland per person has actually shrunk, how is it that we continue to feed growing populations? The amount of energy we invest in each calorie of food produced has climbed steadily, and continues to climb. We have been replacing soil with oil. We now invest about 10 calories of fossil fuel for each calorie of food we get in return. That is long before anyone considers putting those food calories into a gas tank.

The impacts of broad-scale biofuel conversion are beginning to appear. Cars are now consuming most of the annual global increase in grain production that up until now has been feeding our growing population. Prices do not respond in an orderly fashion to reductions in supply. Brazil, being a major producer of ethanol, is a case in point. Some writers claim that food prices escalated in the 1980s in Brazil as a...