February 11th, 2008 by admin
Slowly, people are realising that some biofuel crops can increase carbon emissions and reduce food production. It is so important that only crops with a good energy balance are grown, but government targets and incentives for the inclusion of biofuels do not set any standards for the type of crop or demand any kind of energy audit.
In a new study, Joseph Fargione of the American Nature Conservancy points out that clearing forests, grass and peatlands to make way for biofuel crops like corn and soybeans causes the carbon stored in the soil to escape to the atmosphere. He says that the conversion of peatlands to palm oil plantations in Indonesia has caused the greatest losses, and the conversion of land in Brazil for soy production was also very damaging.
Fargione says, “You release about 280 tons of carbon to the atmosphere for every hectare you convert, and that is compared to the saving you get when you use biodiesel, which is about 0.9 tons of CO2 for every year. So you would take 319 years just to get back to where you started by using biodiesel grown on that land.”
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Even though there is still some relatively small areas of underused land in parts of the old Soviet Union and elsewhere, worldwide we are losing vast areas to desertification, salination and the paving over for new housing, industry roads and other transport infrastructure.
Most unused land in the world is either too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry, too steep or too rocky. With rapid urbanisation happening in most parts of the world, it’s mainly using up flat, fertile land on coastal plains or near rivers. Cities are rarely built in deserts or on mountain sides. China’s population is expected to stabilize at 1.6 billion by 2030 and by then the urban population will have increased by 350 million to 880 million. Analysts from Investec say that to house these people will need almost 50 cities the size of greater London It is hard to imagine the loss of good agricultural land this will cause, but similar urbanisation is taking place in India and the rest of the world.
Most land that has been brought in to farming recently is from rainforest. This is, of course, an ecological disaster and is being discouraged, but in any case much of the rainforest now being destroyed is going in to biofuel production, either palm oil for biodiesel or sugar cane for ethenol.
With world population expected to increase by 1.4 billion to 8 billion by 2025, and most wanting to move up the food chain by eating more meat, there will surely soon be a desperate shortage of good farmland.
