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Policy & Politics Blog
14 December 2010
New Wikileaks show biofuel food impacts were underestimated
Wikileaks, Wikileaks, Wikileaks. Like it or not you can't get away from them. For what seems like weeks the first 10 pages of the Guardian have been almost entirely dedicated to stories related to Wikileaks. Wikileaks have shone a spotlight on issues ranging from war to the sex life of the Italian prime minister.
So you will understand my intrigue as a campaigner raising awareness of the negative impacts of unsustainable biofuels when I found out today that biofuels and GM crops now have their very own Wikileak.
My campaign area is suddenly newsworthy again.
The secret cables reveal some yet more evidence about US attempts to push GM crops onto Africa. The cables also contain notes from an international meeting called by Gordon Brown on biofuels and the food crises in 2008.
In that meeting Joachim Von Braun, Director General of the Inter Food Policy Institute Research (IFPRI) suggested a moratorium on maize for biofuels. Their modelling showed it would immediately slash maize prices by 20 per cent and wheat prices by 10 per cent, with further reductions because it would discourage speculation.
But this idea was dismissed by other participants. Cargill's Ruth Rawling predicted that wheat prices would come down quite quickly without the moratorium. The Overseas Development Institute estimated that prices would fall back from their 2008 peak to roughly what they had been in the early 1990s.
How wrong they were.
Wheat has now risen in price by nearly two-thirds in the past six months. Pier Luigi Sigismondi, Unilever's chief supply chain officer acknowledges: "The world is losing arable land at a rate of about 40,000 square miles a year. That is land being used for biofuel production, while climate change is eroding away topsoil."
As a result the FAO now predicts another major global food crisis for 2011.
Early next year the UK Parliament will decide whether to treble UK biofuel blending mandates from current levels of 3.25% to 10%.
Write to Parliamentary Under Secretary Norman Baker today and ask him to think twice on biofuel expansion
Posted by Kenneth Richter | 14 Dec 2010 | Climate Change, Natural Resources, Real Food
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