Guardian: looming biofuel-based food crisis

The Guardian has a fascinating article about a possible food crisis looming, as a result of food crops being turned over to biofuels.

There really is a boom in the industry, it notes for example that 20% of America’s maize crop last year went to ethanol–which managed to power just 2% of the country’s cars.

Greenbang has noted before that this is causing food prices to rise, threats to the water supply more and more. But as the article points out, the sheer scale of the change is ‘boggling’:

The Indian government says it wants to plant 35m acres (140,000 sq km) of biofuel crops, Brazil as much as 300m acres (1.2m sq km). Southern Africa is being touted as the future Middle East of biofuels, with as much as 1bn acres (4m sq km) of land ready to be converted to crops such as Jatropha curcas (physic nut), a tough shrub that can be grown on poor land. Indonesia has said it intends to overtake Malaysia and increase its palm oil production from 16m acres (64,000 sq km) now to 65m acres (260,000 sq km) in 2025.