From greenwash to cornwash

by | May 29, 2008


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. 

Author

  • Alex Evans is founder of Larger Us, which explores how we can use psychology to reduce political tribalism and polarisation, a senior fellow at New York University, and author of The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough? (Penguin, 2017). He is a former Campaign Director of the 50 million member global citizen’s movement Avaaz, special adviser to two UK Cabinet Ministers, climate expert in the UN Secretary-General’s office, and was Research Director for the Business Commission on Sustainable Development. Alex lives with his wife and two children in Yorkshire.


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