The UK House Of Commons-Style Debate

ACCESS TO FOOD

The debate really took off after Sander van Bennekom, policy officer at The Hague, The Netherlands-based Oxfam/Novib, defended the second motion, ‘Biofuels endanger people’s access to food’.

Van Bennekom was surprised, he said, to see that less than half of the audience joined him in supporting the motion because, like him, they saw the connection between biofuels and access to food. Sugar, wheat and maize are all products that can be eaten by people or used for biofuels, he said, so “by definition there is competition.” Growing crops for biofuels, he said, takes away land that is needed to produce food. One tank of biofuel, Van Bennekom said, takes the same amount of maize as you need to feed one person for one whole year. We need to protect vulnerable people in vulnerable countries from the negative consequences, he said.

Arguing against the motion was Ian Hudson, president of Geneva, Switzerland-based DuPont Europe, Middle East & Africa, who said “it is about time we had a rational debate on this topic.” Every new technology raises issues, he said, but that’s not to say that they cannot be dealt with to produce biofuels in a sustainable way. First, according to Hudson, there is much land to be used for biofuels that is currently not used to grow food. In Russia, for instance, there’s unused land the size of Germany that could be used, he said. What’s more, new technology is being developed that uses other crops than maize to produce fuels. “We will be able to feed nine billion people AND we will be able to move around,” Hudson stated plainly, predicting an evolution in the next fifty years.  “We will move into other crops, into cellulose-based fuels, and into energy crops and agricultural waste,” he said. “Access to food is really not an issue,” Hudson said.

Supporters of the motion, however, were not easily convinced. They said opponents were gambling on the assumption that the use of biotech crops for fuel production will be accepted around the globe, including in Europe. They pointed at rising food prices because of growing demand, and accused proponents of not thoroughly analysing commodity markets and taking into account the situation of farmers in developing countries. “Are you sure there will not be farmers who are tempted to grow energy crops rather than food stock?”

Opponents replied however by stressing that access to food is usually the result of government policies. Responsible governments, they implied, will always put food production ahead of fuel. Not biofuels, but people’s aversion to science and technology and market-disturbing agricultural subsidies endangers access to food, they said, adding that we have no choice but to prepare for the moment that we run out of fossil fuels by finding a way to develop biofuel technologies that go together with food production. “Otherwise, we will have to go back to horses, and they compete with people for food as well,” one participant joked.

In fact, some proponents of the motion agreed with the opposition, calling for an emphasis on the development of new technologies that will be able to increase biofuel yields sufficiently so as to not create real competition with food. “Denying people the development of biofuels is unethical,” one of them went so far as to say.