Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
2008, closely following the price of petroleum. More recently, however, the price
of agricultural products has decreased following the decline in petroleum prices.
In contrast, the point has been made that higher crop prices will not necessarily
harm the poorest people; many of the world's 800 million undernourished people
are farmers or farm laborers, who could benefit from higher crop prices.
To keep the issue in perspective, it is important to remember that, around the
world, 93 million hectares are currently being used to grow soybeans and 148 mil-
lion hectares for corn. In Brazil, bioethanol is mainly produced from sugar cane,
over 5 million hectares of land, and in the United States, the largest producer of
bioethanol in the world today, it is produced from corn, over 11 million hectares
of land. In Europe, ethanol is mainly produced from sugar beets and wheat. China,
the third largest world producer, produces ethanol from corn and wheat.
Worldwide, 1.5 billion hectares of the arable land is already being used for ag-
riculture and another 440 million hectares is potentially available, including 250
million hectares in Latin America and 180 million in Africa. The area currently be-
ing used for biofuels is less than 1% of the land in use; even if this amount were to
grow by an order of magnitude, it would not be a very disturbing expansion. This
problem has been extensively analyzed in many reports, particularly by the World
Bank, which pointed out that several individual factors have driven up grain prices
and not biofuels production. Among them are high energy and fertilizer prices, the
continuing depreciation of the US dollar, drought in Australia, growing global de-
mand for grains (particularly in China), changes in some nations' import-export
policies, speculative activity on future commodities trading, and regional problems
driven by subsidies of biofuels production in the United States and Europe. Biofuel
production does not seem to have been a particularly important driver of the 2008
surge in the price of cereals.
It has also been argued that deforestation in Amazonia can be attributed, directly
or indirectly, to biofuels production in the southeast of Brazil. This is clearly incor-
rect: historical rates of deforestation in Amazonia are 0.5 to 1 million hectares per
year and have been decreasing despite the expansion of sugarcane plantations in
the southeast region of Brazil. In reality, deforestation in Amazonia is due to com-
plex causes, the main ones being expansion of cattle raising and soya bean produc-
tion, both unrelated to sugarcane expansion.
