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Feed the world - end the rush for biofuels

Energy

'This is the new face of hunger,' said Josette Sheeran, director of the World Food Programme, launching an appeal for an extra US$500 million so it could continue supplying food aid to 73 million hungry people this year. 'People are simply being priced out of food markets ... We have never before had a situation where aggressive rises in food prices keep pricing our operations out of our reach.'

The programme decided on a public appeal three weeks ago because the price of the food it buys to feed some of the world's poorest people had risen 55 per cent since last June. By the time it actually launched the appeal, this week, prices had risen a further 20 per cent, so now it needs US$700 million to bridge the gap between last year's budget and this year's prices.

Thai farmers are sleeping in their fields after reports that thieves are stealing the rice, now worth US$600 a tonne, straight out of the fields. Four people have died in Egypt in clashes over subsidised flour that was being sold for profit on the black market. There have been food riots in Morocco, Senegal and Cameroon.

The era of cheap food is over. Food costs worldwide rose 23 per cent between 2006 and 2007. This year, what is becoming clear is the impact of this change on ordinary people's lives.

For consumers in Japan, France or the United States, the relentless price rises for food are an unwelcome extra pressure on an already stretched household budget. For less fortunate people in other places, they can mean less protein in the diet, or choosing between feeding the children breakfast and paying their school fees, or even, in the poorest communities, starvation. And the crisis is only getting started.

It is the perfect storm: everything is going wrong at once. To begin with, the world's population has continued to grow while its food production has not. To make matters worse, demand for food is growing faster than the population. As incomes rise in China, India and other countries with fast-growing economies, consumers include more and more meat in their diet. Producing meat consumes enormous quantities of grain.

Then there is global warming, which is probably already cutting into food production. Many people in Australia, formerly the world's second-largest wheat exporter, suspect that climate change is the real reason for the prolonged drought that is destroying the country's ability to export food.

But the worst damage is being done by the rage for biofuels that supposedly reduce carbon dioxide emissions and fight climate change. (But they don't, really - at least, not in their present form.) Thirty per cent of this year's US grain harvest will go to an ethanol distillery, and the European Union hopes to provide 10 per cent of the fuel used for transport from biofuels by 2010.

Much of the world's farmland is being diverted to feed cars, not people. But governments can simply stop creating artificial demand for biofuels. That land could go back to growing food - and prices would fall.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries

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