By redirecting corn, grains, and other food crops to use as an energy source, biofuel policy in the United States and Europe has been driving up the price of food and contributing to ongoing international shortages. Most recently, the New York Times ran an expose on the devastating effects these policies have had on the poor of Guatemala.

Europe in particular has established new standards mandating that all transportation fuels contain 10 percent biofuel by 2020. While amendements have been proposed to limit the biofuels made from food crops or on land previously devoted top food crops to only half of that portion, they remain in limbo.

So it’s encouraging that a new report from the consultancy CE Delft — commissioned by Greenpeace, Transport & Environment, the European Environmental Bureau and BirdLife Europe — is calling for Europe to meet its 2020 goal without reliance on biofuels from food crops, and laying out the steps for how to get there. GreenBusiness has the story:

The CE Delft report argues the targets can be met through greater investment in fuel efficiency measures, waste and residue-based biofuels, and electric vehicles, alongside tighter rules to phase out the use of biofuels made from land-based food or energy crops.

“The EU Commission’s decision to put a limit on the use of crop-based biofuels is a step in the right direction,” said John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace. “The growing use of transport fuels from crops has driven up food prices, led to more deforestation in places like Indonesia to grow palm oil for fuel, and made climate change worse as a result.”

But he warned that the EU’s proposals needed to be tightened to ensure biofuels that contribute to deforestation and food price inflation are phased out.

“The most serious flaw in the new European biofuel policy is that it does not hold biofuel suppliers accountable for the emissions from indirect land use change, where crops for biofuel displace food production and as a result more rainforests and peatland are cleared to grow food crops,” he said. “So fuel suppliers can still use harmful biofuels like palm oil from Indonesia and claim credit for cutting emissions.”

The report recommends that both the EU and member states should act urgently to “phase out direct and indirect support for land-based biofuels and [adopt] a trajectory from current consumption levels towards near-zero use in order to prevent further environmental and social damage”.

It also calls for tougher reporting requirements for biofuel producers covering their impact on land use and more demanding sustainability criteria for both biofuels and bio-gas.

“The EU and member states need to put a robust policy framework into place that speeds up energy efficiency developments, as well as the production and use of biofuels from waste and residues with no alternative uses,” the report concludes. “This biofuel strategy should be part of a broad biomass and bioenergy strategy, as the sustainable feedstock is limited and other applications will also need sustainable bioenergy to meet their climate goals.”

Almost 870 million people around the world were chronically malnourished between 2010 and 2012. Studies of the food crisis suffered around the globe in 2008 determined that western biofuel policies played a role. And while agricultural production is able to keep pace with global demand for food, that balance becomes more difficult to meet once demand for biofuels is added to the mix, especially during years when the weather is less amenable to crops. So the biofuel demands of Europe — as well as the United States — contribute to this problem by both repurposing existing food supplies, and encouraging farmers to dedicate their land to growing biofuel crops rather than food crops as prices for that produce is driven upwards.

Needless to say, a good deal of human suffering can be produced if Europe can move its energy policy away from the use of any biofuel that impinges on peoples’ food supplies.

Related Posts:

• Biofuels May Push 120 Million Into Hunger, Qatar’s Shah Says: “The era of low food prices … is over.”
• The Corn Ultimatum: How long can Americans keep burning one sixth the world’s corn supply in our cars?

The world wastes from one-third to one-half of the four billion metric tons of food it produces each year, according to a report released last week by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. Because any item of food also represents an entire chain of production, wasted food also translates into wasted fresh water, wasted energy, wasted cropland, and further contributions to global warming with no discernible counter-balancing benefit.

And even as the world wastes huge amounts of food, its ability to produce that food is being put under added stress by global warming and climate change. Studies by Oxfam and other research groups show extreme weather, higher temperatures, flooding and pest outbreaks could increasingly destabilize food production, driving prices up by as much as 180 percent by 2030. East Africa has already seen the worst drought in 60 years, decimating its food supply as climate change makes reduced rainfall a “chronic problem.”

The problem is especially unnerving because, as the report notes, the global population is expected to surge another 2.5 billion by 2075, bringing the total well beyond 9 billion. And according to the UN, nearly 870 million people were already chronically malnourished between 2010 and 2012. As societies become more affluent, global meat consumption per capita is expected to rise 40 percent by 2050, which exacerbates the problem as feeding people with meat is far more inefficient in terms of water, land, and energy input.

The report found that the problem spans both first-world and third-world countries, with most of the waste occurring on the consumer-side in the first case, and on the supplier-side in the second:

In less-developed countries, such as those of sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia, wastage tends to occur primarily at the farmer-producer end of the supply chain. Inefficient harvesting, inadequate local transportation and poor infrastructure mean that produce is frequently handled inappropriately and stored under unsuitable farm site conditions.

As the development level of a country increases, so the food loss problem generally moves further up the supply chain with deficiencies in regional and national infrastructure having the largest impact. […]

In mature, fully developed countries such as the UK, more-efficient farming practices and better transport, storage and processing facilities ensure that a larger proportion of the food produced reaches markets and consumers. However, characteristics associated with modern consumer culture mean produce is often wasted through retail and customer behavior. […]

Controlling and reducing the level of wastage is frequently beyond the capability of the individual farmer, distributor or consumer, since it depends on market philosophies, security of energy supply, quality of roads and the presence of transport hubs. These are all related more to societal, political and economic norms, as well as better-engineered infrastructure, rather than to agriculture. In most cases the sustainable solutions needed to reduce waste are well known. The challenge is transferring this know-how to where it is needed, and creating the political and social environment which encourages both transfer and adoption of these ideas to take place.

The Washington Post‘s Brad Plumer went through the report and listed a whole host of concrete examples of how this takes place: In developed countries such as America and the UK, between 30 and 50 percent of all food bought is thrown away by the purchaser, due to marketing strategies that encourage bulk buying and other issues. Major supermarket chains will often reject whole crops for purely aesthetic reasons — practices that lose the UK one-third of the food it produces, for example. Plumer previously noted other issues in developed countries, including over-zealous sell-by dates, large portion sizes at restaurants that go uneaten, flaws in the processing and distribution chain, and the simple willingness of households to throw out 14 to 25 percent of the food they buy simply because it’s cheap.

In developing countries, the problem is much more one of inadequate infrastructure: India loses at least 40 percent of its food en route between growers and consumers due to lack of refrigeration, bad roads, and corruption. Africa has many similar problems. Countries such as Pakistan and the former Soviet Republicans have out-dated and inadequate storage facilities — Pakistan loses 16 percent of its grain production annually because poor storage allows for rodent infestation. Rice loss in Southeast Asian countries ranges from 37 percent all the way up to 80 percent.

On top of this, about 70 percent of the 3.8 trillion cubic meters humans use annually goes into agriculture, meaning the potential for wasted water resources is huge. About 550 billion cubic meters of water are wasted around the world each year producing crops that are never consumed. And by 2050, demand for water in food production could be driven to 10 or even 13 trillion cubic meters per year.

Related Post:

• Oxfam Warns Climate Change And Extreme Weather Will Cause Food Prices To Soar

A new report in The New York Times highlights how biofuel policy in the United States and Europe has produced a rolling food catastrophe in Guatemala.

The country once enjoyed a nearly self-sufficient level of corn production, but domestic producers were undercut by American corn exports subsidized by U.S. agricultural policy. Guatemala’s domestic corn supplies dropped nearly 30 percent per capita between 1995 and 2005.

In 2007, the United States established its expanded biofuel standards, and began relying on corn to meet them. That drove up demand, and the flow of cheap corn into Guatemala dried up. Meanwhile, larger farms and industrial producers took up much of Guatemala’s available cropland and water supplies to produce sugar cane, vegetable oil, and other crops to meet increased global demand for biofuel, due to European as well as U.S. policies.

The result left subsistence farmers with less and less land to work, and the average Guatemalan — whose diet is heavily corn-based — with no where else to turn for affordable food:

In a country where most families must spend about two thirds of their income on food, “the average Guatemalan is now hungrier because of biofuel development,” said Katja Winkler, a researcher at Idear, a Guatemalan nonprofit organization that studies rural issues. Roughly 50 percent of the nation’s children are chronically malnourished, the fourth-highest rate in the world, according to the United Nations. […]

But many worry that Guatemala’s poor are already suffering from the diversion of food to fuel. “There are pros and cons to biofuel, but not here,” said Misael Gonzáles of C.U.C., a labor union for Guatemala’s farmers. “These people don’t have enough to eat. They need food. They need land. They can’t eat biofuel, and they don’t drive cars.”

In 2011, corn prices would have been 17 percent lower if the United States did not subsidize and give incentives for biofuel production with its renewable fuel policies, according to an analysis by Bruce A. Babcock, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University. The World Bank has suggested that biofuel mandates in the developed world should be adjusted when food is short or prices are inordinately high. […]

In part because [the United Nations World Food Program in Guatemala's] primary food supplement is a mix of corn and soy, it cannot afford to help all of the Guatemalan children in need, Mr. Gauvreau said; it is agency policy to buy corn locally, but there is no extra corn grown here anymore. And Guatemalans cannot go back to the land because so much of it is being devoted to growing crops for biofuel. (Almost no biofuel is used domestically.)

In short, Guatemala is a microcosm for the damage Western food-based biofuels are doing to food supplies for the global poor. The United States is currently on track to devote nearly 40 percent of its own corn crop, and 15 percent of the world’s corn supplies, to biofuels. By 2020, European standards will mandate that transportation fuels contain 10 percent biofuels. (Although the European Commission “recently proposed amending its policy so that only half of its 2020 target could be met by using biofuels made from food crops or those grown on land previously devoted to food crops,” according to the New York Times.)

Most assessments of the 2008 food crisis found that biofuels played a role. Agricultural production is able to keep up with the world’s growing demand for food; however, the growing demand for biofuels make it more difficult to match that demand in years when weather is poor. As global warming continues to raise the odds of extreme weather, less reliable rain, and less reliable growing seasons, the potential to meet that demand diminishes.

At the same time, most studies have determined that because of the carbon emissions involved in biofuels’ agricultural production, their net effect on greenhouse gases is either negligible or negative. More advanced biofuels, such as the ones based on microalgae, could provide a solution, but they have not been fully commercialized. For the moment, we’re causing severe damage to the world’s food supply with no real benefit to the global warming problem.

by Katie Valentine

A severe drop in the world’s grain supply due to this summer’s extreme weather events has driven up food prices and could lead to a major hunger crisis in 2013, UN officials say.

Widespread drought and record-breaking heat waves across the U.S. caused mass soybean and corn crop failures this summer, leading to the worst harvest in more than 50 years.  Similar weather is expected to cut grain harvests in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan – which together supply a quarter of world’s wheat exports – by 27 percent. These production shortages have led to the U.S. consuming more grain than it produces, running grain stocks down to historically low levels.

And the U.S. isn’t alone: worldwide food consumption has surpassed production for the sixth time in 11 years, and countries have reduced reserves from an average 107 days of consumption 10 years ago to less than 74 days in recent years. This drop in food reserves leaves “no room for unexpected events next year,” Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, told the Guardian.

The low crop yields have caused a spike in food prices around the world, with the UN FAO reporting a Food Price Index rise of 1.4 percent in September, following an increase of 6 percent in July. This price increase hurts the world’s poorest countries, where as much as 60 to 80 percent of household budgets are spent on food. Families in these countries eat less often, buy cheaper, less nutritious and less varied food, and must make cuts in other areas in order to feed themselves. Rising food prices are expected to increase the grain import bill for poor countries to $36.5 billion in 2012-2013 – a 3.7 percent jump from last year’s bill.

Increased food prices could also lead to increased instability around the world. One study concluded that riots become more likely when Food Price Index levels surpass 210 points. Currently at 216 points, Food Price Index levels are 22 points away from those that some say helped spark the riots leading to the Arab Spring. They’ve certainly contributed to instability in the past: food price spikes in 2007 and 2008 sparked food riots in countries across the world, which led to the death of five people and the collapse of the government in Haiti.

In the U.S., consumers don’t often take to the streets to protest the rise in food prices, in part because food makes up so little of our household budgets – in 2011, U.S. consumers spent on average about 7 percent of their income on food, compared to 43 percent in Indonesia. Still, food prices aren’t going unnoticed in America. The price of corn increased 60 percent during the summer, causing some restaurants to cut corn from their menus and serve grain-intensive beef less often. The price of chicken, turkey and eggs is up from last year, and menu prices at Olive Garden, McDonalds, Buffalo Wild Wings have increased in response to higher food prices. And farmers are adjusting too: chicken suppliers are growing larger birds so they have fewer mouths to feed, and this fall, farmers are feeding  their cows candy as a cheaper alternative to corn.

During the October 16 Committee on World Food Security 39^th session in Rome, the UN focused talks on what can be done to combat the rising price of food. Officials noted that the number of people suffering from hunger has stopped going down over the past several years, and is actually increasing in Africa and the Middle East. During the committee session, which runs from October 15 – 20, the UN is stressing the importance of agricultural cooperatives as key players in ending poverty and hunger.

Katie Valentine is a graduate from the University of Georgia. She currently interns on the international policy team at the Center for American Progress.

Humanity’s Choice (via M.I.T.): Inaction (“No Policy”) eliminates most of the uncertainty about whether future warming will be catastrophic. Aggressive emissions reductions greatly improves humanity’s chances.

In this post, I will summarize what the recent scientific literature says are the key impacts we face in the coming decades if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path. These include:

• Staggeringly high temperature rise, especially over land — some 10°F over much of the United States
• Permanent Dust Bowl conditions over the U.S. Southwest and many other regions around the globe that are heavily populated and/or heavily farmed.
• Sea level rise of some 1 foot by 2050, then 4 to 6 feet (or more) by 2100, rising some 6 to 12 inches (or more) each decade thereafter
• Massive species loss on land and sea — perhaps 50% or more of all biodiversity.
• Unexpected impacts — the fearsome “unknown unknowns”
• Much more extreme weather
• Food insecurity — the increasing difficulty of feeding 7 billion, then 8 billion, and then 9 billion people in a world with an ever-worsening climate.
• Myriad direct health impacts

Remember, these will all be happening simultaneously and getting worse decade after decade. Equally tragic, a 2009 NOAA-led study found the worst impacts would be “largely irreversible for 1000 years.”

The single biggest failure of messaging by climate scientists (until very recently) has been the failure to explain to the public, opinion makers, and the media that business-as-usual warming results in simultaneous, ever-worsening impacts that, individually, are each beyond catastrophic, but combined are unimaginablly horrific. For these impacts, terms like “global warming” and “climate change” are essentially euphemisms. That is why I have preferred the term “Hell and High Water.”

By virtue of their success in promoting doubt and inaction, the climate science deniers and disinformers have, tragically and ironically, turned the worst-case scenario into business as usual.

Business as usual typically means continuing at recent growth rates of carbon dioxide emissions, which we now know would likely take us to atmospheric concentrations of CO2 greater than 850 ppm if not above 1000 ppm (see U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories are being realised”). Annual emissions now exceed 10 billion metric tons of carbon (~37 billions metric tons of CO2). Emissions have been rising about 3% per year for the past decade.

What is less well understood is that even a very strong mitigation effort that kept carbon emissions this century to 11 billion tons a year on average would still probably take us to 1000 ppm (A1FI scenario) — a little noted conclusion of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report (see “Nature publishes my climate analysis and solution“).

Until recently, the scientific community has spent little time modeling the impacts of a tripling (~830 ppm) or quadrupling (~1100 ppm) carbon dioxide concentrations from preindustrial levels. In part, I think, that’s because they never believed humanity would be so self-destructive as to ignore their science-based warnings and simply continue on its unsustainable path. In part, they lowballed the difficult-to-model amplifying feedbacks in the carbon cycle.

So I pieced together those impacts from available studies and from discussions with leading climate scientists for my 2006 book, Hell and High Water. But now the scientific literature on what we face is much richer — as climate scientists have sobered up to their painful role as modern-day Cassandra’s (see Lonnie Thompson on why climatologists are speaking out: “Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization”).

In a 2010 AAAS presentation, the late William R. Freudenburg of UC Santa Barbara discussed his research on “the Asymmetry of Scientific Challenge“: New scientific findings since the 2007 IPCC report are found to be more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected,” rather than “not as bad as previously expected.”

This post will review the latest findings. It will serve as a foundation for a multi-part series that attempts to clear up some of the confusion over the supposed high degree of “uncertainty” surrounding climate impacts. That series will make clear that we have an unusually high degree of certainty around future climate impacts if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path.

This post — an update — covers more than 60 recent scientific studies along with numerous review pieces that themselves each cover a large segment of the recent literature. Please add links to more studies in the comments.

We will see why inaction on climate change is “incompatible with organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems & has a high probability of not being stable (i.e.  4°C [7F] would be an interim temperature on the way to a much higher equilibrium level),” according to Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Britain (see here).

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Note: The “additional price increase” percentage is calculated off the original price increase.

As Oxfam explains in its news release:

Food price spikes will get worse as extreme weather caused by climate change devastates food production

New research shows that the full impact of climate change on future food prices is being underestimated, according to international agency Oxfam.

Oxfam’s new report, Extreme Weather, Extreme Prices, highlights for the first time how extreme weather events such as droughts and floods could drive up future food prices. Previous research only tends to consider gradual impacts, such as increasing temperatures and changing rainfall patterns.

Oxfam’s findings should come as no surprise to anyone following recent headlines. Here’s an August 30th story from the World Bank:

Severe Droughts Drive Food Prices Higher, Threatening the Poor

Global food prices soared by 10 percent in July from a month ago, with maize and soybean reaching all-time peaks due to an unprecedented summer of droughts and high temperatures in both the United States and Eastern Europe, according to the World Bank Group’s latest Food Price Watch report.

And here’s one from the UK Guardian from September 2nd:

The era of cheap food may be over

A spike in prices caused by poor harvests and rising demand is an apt moment for the west to reassess the wisdom of biofuels

Duh? See CP’s 2011 posts, “The Corn Ultimatum: How long can Americans keep burning one sixth the world’s corn supply in our cars?” and “Biofuels May Push 120 Million Into Hunger, Qatar’s Shah Says.”

Last December I wrote that the Climate Story of the Year was “Warming-Driven Drought and Extreme Weather Emerge as Key Threat to Global Food Security.” This may well be the climate story of the decade — though the world’s inaction on carbon pollution, the media’s silence on climate change, the GOP’s descent into hard-core denial, and the Arctic Death Spiral will all be battling for that title.

Here’s more from the Oxfam news release on this most important of stories:

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