Summary
Biofuels are presented in rich countries as a solution to two crises: the climate crisis and the oil crisis. But they may not be a solution to either, and instead are contributing to a third: the current food crisis.

Meanwhile the danger is that they allow rich-country governments to avoid difficult but urgent decisions about how to reduce consumption of oil, while offering new avenues to continue expensive support to agriculture at the cost of taxpayers.

In the meantime, the most serious costs of these policies – deepening poverty and hunger, environmental degradation, and accelerating climate change – are being ‘dumped’ on developing countries.

Neither a solution to the climate crisis…
Rich countries’ biofuel policies currently offer neither a safe nor an effective means to tackle climate change. By increasing aggregate demand for agricultural land, they will drive the expansion of farming into critical carbon sinks such as forests, wetlands, and grasslands, triggering the release of carbon from soils and vegetation that will take decades and in some cases centuries of biofuel production to repay, at a time when emissions need to peak and fall within the next 10 to 15 years:

• Analysis published in the journal Science calculates that the emissions from global land-use change due to the US corn-ethanol programme will take 167 years to pay back.

• European Union (EU) biodiesel consumption is driving spiralling demand for palm oil both for use in biodiesel, but also to replace rapeseed and other edible oils diverted into the European biofuel programme. Oxfam estimates that by 2020, the emissions resulting from land-use change in the palm-oil sector may have reached between 3.1 and 4.6 billion tonnes of CO2 – 46 to 68 times the annual saving the EU hopes to be achieving by then from biofuels.

Even ignoring land-use change, biofuels are an overly expensive way of achieving emissions reductions from transport. Improving car efficiency is far more cost effective: while the costs of avoiding a tonne of CO2 through biofuels run into the hundreds of dollars, ambitious improvements in vehicle efficiency can yield profits, as reduced fuel costs exceed technology costs. Biomass can be used far more efficiently in static applications such as commercial boilers or combined heat and power.

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