From greenwash to cornwash

May 29, 2008 | Alex Evans | More on Climate Change, Food prices, Scarcity, US politics | 

You’ve heard of greenwash.  Now: cornwash!  A firm called Abengoa Bioenergy has a full page advertisement in today’s FT, which begins thus:

Manipulation: Bioethanol is the main cause of increased food prices.

Evidence: The main factors of the staggering cost of food are a shift in the Asian diet … and the current price for oil…. In fact, it is estimated that the impact of biofuels on cereal prices will only be in the range of 3% to 6% as compared to 2006 prices.

Where to start? Well, maybe with the point that their advert rests on attacking a straw man.  Hardly anyone would disagree that high income growth, leading to changing diet patterns, is the single largest driver of rising prices. 

What the advert doesn’t say is that most analysts would also put biofuels as the second largest.  Opinion varies as to how much of the food price rise over the last three years is down to biofuels; FAO reckon 15-20%, while IFPRI reckon it’s more like 30%. (I know of at least two experts in the World Bank who’d argue privately that the figure is somewhere between 50% and 70%.)  Here’s one of the authors of FAO’s latest World Food Outlook report:

Biofuels are the largest new source of demand for agriculture and are causing higher prices.  We are very worried particularly about biofuel policy. US government incentives for ethanol producers are distorting the market.

True, not all biofuels are problematic.  Second generation biofuels like cellulose are great, though not commercially viable yet.  Jatropha looks promising.  Ethanol from sugar may yet prove sustainable. 

But as the 5th largest producer of bioethanol in the US, Abengoa’s one of the prime beneficiaries of subsidies for corn-based ethanol - which, despite being on track to hoover up a whole third of the US corn crop this year, is nonetheless one of the biofuels that from a food security or climate viewpoint alike just makes no sense: for the amount of corn it takes to fill up an SUV with ethanol, you could feed a person for a year. 

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Comments

One Response to “From greenwash to cornwash”

  1. ringisei on June 7th, 2008 7:44 am

    Have you seen this week’s version of the Abengoa ad? The number of sources cited has dropped from 4 to 2; the three papers by Pingali, Urbanchuk and IEA are no longer cited.

    It seems pretty obvious re: Pingali as that paper was only about the Asian diet and did not compare its impact with biofuels. But it’s less clear why the latter two are no longer cited.