“More Choice for Scotland”
Friday, 26th September 2008
Biofuels and its potential damage to our environment
Dear Sir,
Professor Robert Watson (‘Running cars on biofuels ‘could do more harm than good’, 25 March) was quite right to question the potential damage that biofuels could do to our environment.
It is indisputable that we have to search for alternative fuel sources, but in their mad rush to embrace biofuels, many people are neglecting to consider the mass deforestation that is taking place globally to fulfil this demand and to replace land lost to food production. Vast tracts of the Amazonian and Indonesian rain forests are being torn up to make way for biofuel crops like palm oil and for food crops like soya, releasing millions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere and threatening to destroy our global air-conditioning system.
Such is the panic caused by climate change that politicians and planners are in danger of creating a bigger global problem than they set out to resolve. Greed instead of care for the environment has become the defining feature of our strategy for tackling climate change and the race to biofuels is potentially threatening the lives of millions of people as the global population soars from its present 6 billion to an estimated 9 billion by 2050. An extra 6 million people are born every month. By 2030 the world population will have expanded by such an extent that we will require a 50% increase in food production to meet anticipated demand. By 2080 global food production would need to double. But the reality is that an area the size of the Ukraine is being taken out of agricultural food production every year due to drought and as a direct consequence of climate change. Global food production is declining rather than expanding.
Already the strains are showing in escalating food prices, but soon we will not have enough food or water to meet the needs of our citizens. The spectre of empty supermarket shelves, even in the West, must now be considered a real possibility. Only genetically modified foods offer a potential way out of this looming crisis, but the ‘Frankenstein Food’ headlines have scared us into banning GM foods, without due cause, across the EU. Already we have seen food shortage riots in Africa, consumer protests against rising prices in Europe and significant falls in rice production in Asia. Food security is now top of the political agenda.
We need to take stock of the situation and develop a precautionary approach to climate change with the creation of a massive public/private/NGO partnership which places a value on the world’s forests and pays those countries where the forests are located for the global services they provide. Huge sums of money will have to be transferred to these countries if we are to persuade them to stop deforestation. Meanwhile, we need to revisit our attitude to GM foods and accept that scientific advances in biotechnology offer the only way to avoid a global famine.
Scientists say that we have only around 18 months left to find a solution to this problem. The doomsday clock is ticking fast towards midnight.
