UN: Biofuel production 'criminal path' to global food crisis

Your 'fiery' friend is absolutely right. Burning precious and dwindling food resources for fuel is madness.

Biofuel turned out to be scam. What a disappointment. I agree. Poor nations need the land to produce food to feed their own people. Not to make the highly expensive and wasteful biofuel pyramid scheme.

Another problem is that biofuels made from corn or food crops are actually bad for the environment and the only biofuel that actually works is that made from sugarcane!

bio mass and waste can create bio-fuel. there are low cost feedstocks other than food crops.

anyone making bio-fuel from expensive food sources will simply fall by the wayside and not be able to make a profit.

President Bush's mandate requiring that refiners buy 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol by 2015 is contributing to world starvation through higher corn and food prices causing shortages of food. The President's approval rating is now at the lowest record ever since the ratings have been recorded. This sure isn't going to help that rating!

Yaya, 1Eco_media! Someone thinks around here!

Waste oil is perfectly fine to use for biofuel production, and there is TONS of it out there. Waste oil has NO effect on the global food crisis, unless everyone stops eating fried food AND meat. Then, and only then can we blame biofuels for our food problems

i think a food crisis as a result of biofuels is unlikely right now given the statistics. what i do think is likely is western countries using crops that would otherwise go to starving countries to make biofuel, that sounds much more up our street and is far more easily ignored :P.

Biofuels are also not a replacement for petroleum. They need to be seen as a tool to enable us to transition from a fossil fuel addicted society to a sustainable one.

Yes to waste an algae! Sugarcane, although a better fuel source than corn, still isn't a good alternative.

When we run our agriculture model on an industrial scale, yields will continue to decrease and the land will become more degraded as our population increases, and we will be 'up a crick with no paddle' so to speak soon enough.

for bio fuels, instead of using a crop like corn, a cheaper and more efficient method is hemp.
Hemp is the green solution this world needs.

Dude . . . if the idea is so great, why do you need the government to support it? How does that make you any different from the beneficiaries of the Farm Bill, for instance? Why can't you sell it?

I stand corrected. Not all biofuels are the same. Some have minimal impact on the environment to produce, such as algae, and others are actually helpful to the environment - taking waste cooking oil and turning them into fuel. Otherwise, these oils will just ferment and turn into methane at waste dumps.

It just happens that Bush likes the kinds of biofuels that take a ton of petroleum to produce, such as corn ethanol. He will only do something if it makes the oil men a lot of money.

i am guessing you view both farming and alternative energy investment to be extremely easy, almost like investing in the long bond perhaps. Good luck with all of that.

Should all be easy for YOU to sell as you say.

I myself see both as very, very, high risk.