Bio Fuel Campaign
Feel like helping out with a spot of e-campaigning on the tricky subject of Biofuels?
We are supporting a petition from BiofuelWatch. You may have already heard that the Government announced plans that a compulsory amount of Biofuel is now blended in with all petrol sold in the UK - 2.5%. This may or may not be a huge disaster - there is a strong call for this plan to be suspended.
We really need to be sure that this is a correct action and not hurry into something that has massive repercussions throughout the world. This issue is not just about carbon emissions, but very importantly it could have a massive impact on the world's food supply. Ethics Girls believes that we should have a considered approach to this and not rush in quickly for the sake of taking action. Please read the following campaign from Biofuelwatch - there is background information with facts etc & an e-campaign for emailing your MP. http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/mp-Mar2008.php
Please email your MP if you feel strongly about this & also pass this on to all those you think should read this.
for more information on this matter please go to the BioFuelWatch website.
More and more grain and vegetable oil which should be used for food is being turned into biofuels for transport. This means cereals - corn, wheat, bread and pasta - and vegetable oil are becoming more expensive. It also makes meat and dairy more expensive, because grain is now turned into ethanol (biofuel), instead of feeding animals. High food prices are causing hardship in industrialised countries. In poorer countries, high food prices mean more people going hungry or starving.
The UK government's new chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington
recently warned in a speech on March 6th: "It is very hard to imagine how we can see a world growing enough crops to produce renewable energy and at the same time meet the enormous increase in the demand for food which is quite properly going to happen as we alleviate poverty."
This is a real crisis happening now - Josette Sheeran, the head of the UN's
World Food Programme (WFP) that warned that due to rising food prices WPF is short of $0.5billion just to meet existing food aid deliveries. High prices
are forcing more people into needing food aid too - for example, in
Afghanistan, 2.55 million more people need food aid because they can no
longer afford wheat.
More details at:http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/foodcrisis.php
The Environmental Audit Committee recently called for a moratorium on the
RTFO on sustainability grounds. Now there are grounds on the basis of the
most important of human resources - food. PLEASE HELP US in urging MPs in
the UK Parliament to suspend the RTFO.
Here are some comments from the posting we made on this issue on the website Ethical Pulse
Nick St Clare (Homepage) on 2008-03-29 23:05 (Reply)
Has anyone considered the quantity of OIL BASED fertiliser, pesticide, and herbicide, used in the production of so-called BIO FUELS? Also, when fitted with a catalytic converter and running on lead free fuel, a car typically shows a 15% reduction in harmful emissions WHEN THE ENGINE IS WARM... it takes 5 miles of driving to warm a car's engine, and 80% of car journeys are UNDER 5 miles! Even worse, the manufacture of a car causes more than 100 times the environmental damage and destruction, than is caused through exhaust emissions in the entire life-time of the car. Adding these together, we find that when fitted with a catalytic converter and running on lead free fuel, in 20% of car journeys we are saving 15% of 100th = 0.03% of the total environmental damage and destruction caused by a car.
#2 Philippa on 2008-04-03 08:41 (Reply)
If everyone was veggie, then couldn't we have both? Isn't more land spent growing crops for animal feed than for biofuels? Any increases in food prices are just as attributable to the demand for a western meat-based diet in the developing world and bad weather in the last couple of years. Attacking biofuels is easy. Finding real solutions and changing behaviour is the hard bit. Perhaps we should be spending our energy on getting people out of their cars...
#2.1 'Pulse' Editor on 2008-04-03 09:58 (Reply)
It's a knotty issue Philippa. Moving to a more plant based diet would help - vegan rather than veggie. But there simply isn't enough land to support both food and biofuel crops to feed an ever growing global population. The impact of biofuels is being felt right now by the poorest people in the world. Basic staples like rice, corn, soya and maize are rocketing up in price. It's time the developed world came to its senses and realised that we simply can't go on saying it's 'business as usual' - we have to start powering down.
I was extremely interested in this article as my partner has recently been talking about converting our diesel people carrier (I have a baby + 2 stepchildren and we live in the country... very hard to manage without a vehicle) to vegetable oil and our first thought was in fact: it might be cheaper for us but there's not enough space/resources on the planet to grow all the crops needed to make this a viable option. So we decided against it, the next day your article comes into my inbox... But we still have a car (guilt aplenty here) and we would be clearly happier knowing there is an alternative to the fuel we use at the moment. Electricity? Animal dung?
The Pleasures of the Flesh Posted April 15, 2008
If you care about hunger, eat less meat.
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 15th April 2008
Never mind the economic crisis. Focus for a moment on a more urgent threat: the great food recession which is sweeping the world faster than the credit crunch.
You have probably seen the figures by now: the price of rice has risen by three-quarters in the past year, that of wheat by 130%(1). There are food crises in 37 countries. One hundred million people, according to the World Bank, could be pushed into deeper poverty by the high prices(2). But I bet you have missed the most telling statistic. At 2.1bn tonnes, last year’s global grain harvest broke all records(3). It beat the previous year’s by almost 5%. The crisis, in other words, has begun before world food supplies are hit by climate change. If hunger can strike now, what will happen if harvests decline?
There is plenty of food. It is just not reaching human stomachs. Of the 2.13bn tonnes likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), will feed people(4).
I am sorely tempted to write another column about biofuels. From this morning all sellers of transport fuel in the United Kingdom will be obliged to mix it with ethanol or biodiesel made from crops. The World Bank points out that “the grain required to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle with ethanol … could feed one person for a year”(5). Last year global stockpiles of cereals declined by around 53m tonnes(6); this gives you a rough idea of the size of the hunger gap. The production of biofuels this year will consume almost 100m tonnes(7), which suggests that they are directly responsible for the current crisis. In the Guardian yesterday the transport secretary Ruth Kelly promised that “if we need to adjust policy in the light of new evidence, we will.”(8) What new evidence does she require? In the midst of a global humanitarian crisis, we have just become legally obliged to use food as fuel. It is a crime against humanity in which every driver in this country has been forced to participate.
But I have been saying this for four years and I am boring myself. Of course we must demand that our governments scrap the rules which turn grain into the fastest food of all. But there is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer. While 100m tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals(9). This could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat.
While meat consumption is booming in Asia and Latin America, in the United Kingdom it has scarcely changed since the government started gathering data in 1974. At just over 1kg per person per week(10), it’s still about 40% above the global average(11), though less than half the amount consumed in the United States(12). We eat less beef and more chicken than we did 30 years ago, which means a smaller total impact. Beef cattle eat about 8kg of grain or meal for every kilogramme of flesh they produce; a kilogramme of chicken needs just 2kg of feed. Even so, our consumption rate is plainly unsustainable.
In his magazine The Land, Simon Fairlie has updated the figures produced 30 years ago in Kenneth Mellanby’s book Can Britain Feed Itself? Fairlie found that a vegan diet grown by means of conventional agriculture would require only 3m hectares of arable land (around half the current total)(13). Even if we reduced our consumption of meat by half, a mixed farming system would need 4.4m hectares of arable fields and 6.4 million hectares of pasture. A vegan Britain could make a massive contribution to global food stocks.
But I cannot advocate a diet I am incapable of following. I tried it for about 18 months, lost two stone, went as white as bone and felt that I was losing my mind. I know a few healthy-looking vegans and I admire them immensely. But after almost every talk I give, I am pestered by swarms of vegans demanding that I adopt their lifestyle. I cannot help noticing that in most cases their skin has turned a fascinating pearl grey.
What level of meat-eating would be sustainable? One approach is to work out how great a cut would be needed to accommodate the growth in human numbers. The UN expects the population to rise to 9bn by 2050. These extra people will require another 325m tonnes of grain(14). Let us assume, perhaps generously, that politicians like Ms Kelly are able to “adjust policy in the light of new evidence” and stop turning food into fuel. Let us pretend that improvements in plant breeding can keep pace with the deficits caused by climate change. We would need to find an extra 225m tonnes of grain. This leaves 531m tonnes for livestock production, which suggests a sustainable consumption level for meat and milk some 30% below the current world rate. This means 420g of meat per person per week, or about 40% of the UK’s average consumption.
This estimate is complicated by several factors. If we eat less meat we must eat more plant protein, which means taking more land away from animals. On the other hand, some livestock is raised on pasture, so it doesn’t contribute to the grain deficit. Simon Fairlie estimates that if animals were kept only on land that’s unsuitable for arable farming, and given scraps and waste from food processing, the world could produce between a third and two thirds of its current milk and meat supply(15). But this system then runs into a different problem. The FAO calculates that animal keeping is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions. The environmental impacts are especially grave in places where livestock graze freely(16). The only reasonable answer to the question of how much meat we should eat is as little as possible. Let’s reserve it - as most societies have done until recently - for special occasions.
For both environmental and humanitarian reasons, beef is out. Pigs and chickens feed more efficiently, but unless they are free range you encounter another ethical issue: the monstrous conditions in which they are kept. I would like to encourage people to start eating tilapia instead of meat. It’s a freshwater fish which can be raised entirely on vegetable matter and has the best conversion efficiency - about 1.6kg of feed for 1kg of meat - of any farmed animal(17). Until meat can be grown in flasks, this is about as close as we are likely to come to sustainable flesh-eating.
Re-reading this article, I see that there is something surreal about it. While half the world wonders whether it will eat at all, I am pondering which of our endless choices we should take. Here the price of food barely registers. Our shops are better stocked than ever before. We perceive the global food crisis dimly, if at all. It is hard to understand how two such different food economies could occupy the same planet, until you realise that they feed off each other. www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Eg http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/7284196.stm
2. World Bank, 14th April 2008. Food Price Crisis Imperils 100 Million in Poor Countries, Zoellick Says. Press release. http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/
3. Food and Agriculture Organisation, April 2008. Crop Prospects and Food Situation.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/ai465e/ai465e01.htm
4. ibid.
5. World Bank, 2008. Biofuels: The Promise and the Risks. http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/
6. Gerrit Buntrock, 6th December 2007. Cheap no more. The Economist.
7. Food and Agriculture Organisation, April 2008, ibid.
8. Ruth Kelly, 14th April 2008. Biofuels: a blueprint for the future? The Guardian.
9. Food and Agriculture Organisation, April 2008, ibid.
10. The British government gives a total meat purchase figure of 1042g/person/week for 2006.
http://statistics.defra.gov.uk/esg/publications/efs/datasets/UKHHcons.xls
11. There’s a discussion of global average figures here: http://envirostats.info/2007/09/18/0406/
12. See Food and Agriculture Organisation, 2006. Livestock’s Long Shadow. Figure 1.4, p9.
ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/a0701e/a0701e.pdf
13. Simon Fairlie, Winter 2007-8. Can Britain Feed Itself? The Land.
14. Based on the current population of 6.8bn consuming 1006mt of grain.
15. Simon Fairlie, forthcoming. Default livestock farming. The Land, Summer 2008.
16. Food and Agriculture Organisation, 2006. Livestock’s Long Shadow.
ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/a0701e/a0701e.pdf
17. The FAO (ibid) gives 1.6-1.8. On April 12th, I spoke to Francis Murray of the Institute of Aquaculture, University of Stirling, who suggested 1.5.
