International Policies on Bioenergy and Biofuels - Industrial Crops: Breeding for BioEnergy and Bioproducts - page 393

producing biofuel crops, that is, biofuel policies cause substitution in land use
between food and biofuel crops. The indirect impact on land use change captures
the total land cultivation expansion, implying that new land, which previously was
not used for agricultural production (such as idle land or forest land), is converted
into arable land [ 1 , 10 , 11 , 39 ].
The empirical literature on the land use change impacts of biofuels mostly relies
on partial and general equilibrium simulation models [ 14 , 20 , 64 , 71 - 74 ]. In
general, these studies find a positive impact of biofuels on land use, but the effects
vary strongly across models, depending on model assumptions and simulated
scenario. For example, Searchinger et al. [ 20 ] used a global model to analyze the
land use change impact of an ethanol increase in the United States. They estimate
that ethanol increase of 56 billion liters (14.8 billion gallons) brings 10.8 million
hectares of additional land into cultivation worldwide: 2.8 million hectares in
Brazil, 2.3 million hectares in China and India, and 2.2 million hectares in the
United States. Their results also show that new crops do not necessarily replace all
corn diverted to ethanol (12.8 million hectares), because the ethanol coproduct
replaces roughly one third of animal feed, which otherwise would be diverted away
in the absence of feed coproduct.
Tyner et al. [ 74 ] apply a general equilibrium model to estimate land use change
impact of the U.S. corn ethanol production. According to this study, the estimated
land use changes heavily depend on model assumptions, such as yields, population
growth, and base year. Their results imply that producing 50 billion liters of ethanol
requires between 1.72 and 2.96 million hectares of additional land. In contrast,
Darlington [ 39 ] finds that the expansion of corn ethanol production to 56.8 billion
liters per year by 2015 is unlikely to result in the conversion of nonagricultural land,
arguing that yield improvements will offset the global demand for cropland to meet
the corn ethanol production growth.
Piroli, Ciaian, and Kancs [ 19 ] apply time series analytical mechanisms and show
that biofuels may have both direct and indirect land use change impacts in the
United States. Their results show that wheat, barley, and corn areas expand due to
biofuels (between 4.3 and 14.8 thousand hectares per $1/barrel increase in the fuel
price), whereas rice and soybean contract (between 27.0 and 1.2 ha per $1/barrel
increase in the fuel price). The indirect land use changes are also found to be
significant, that is, total land use expands up to 56.3 thousand hectares per $1/barrel
increase in the fuel price. Similarly, Diermeier and Schmidt [ 75 ] estimate a vector
autoregressive model to analyze the global impact of crude oil on land use. They
find significant global impacts of the oil price on the areas used for production of
corn, soybean oil, sugar, and wheat. However, for other commodities (rice, sun-
flower, cereals), the effects were not significant.