VK should (everybody should) study Slide # 32 of Joachim von Braun's PowerPoint presentation (500kb PDF warning) from February. Here are the price-effects for a Bangladesh five-person household living on one dollar-a-day per person:

First, this is how they spend their $5:

$3.00 on food
$0.50 on household energy
$1.50 on non-food items

A 50% increase in food and energy prices requires them to cut $1.75 of their expenditures

Cuts will be made most in food expenditures:

�� Reduced diet quality, and
�� Increased micronutrient malnutrition
�� Delay in wage rate adjustments

----------------------------------------------

Now let's consider his claim of imminent commercial viability of cellulosic ethanol. His best-known investment, Range Fuels (formerly Kergy Inc.) of Broomfield, Colorado, will be granted up to $76 million by the federal government for their plant being constructed in Soperton (Treutlen County), Georgia. So a large amount of the capital cost of the plant ($1.55 per annual gallon, based on the original proposal for 40 million gallons of ethanol per year and 9 million gallons per year of methanol) will have been underwritten by the federal government.

In addition, according to an article in the Atlanta Constitution, Treutlen County offered tax abatements and a 97-acre tract in its industrial park worth $350,000. And the state's OneGeorgia Authority, which uses tobacco settlement money for rural economic development, was (in February 2007) likely to approve a $6 million grant for Treutlen County to help Range Fuels buy production equipment. The company has also benefited from a 4 percent sales tax exemption for materials and equipment used to construct biofuel facilities.

Now, let's look at the economic viability of the plant once it is operating. To start off, it will benefit from the federal volumetric ethanol excise tax credit (VEETC) of 51¢ per gallon. In addition, because during Phase I the plant will produce only about 20 million gallons of ethanol and methanol per year, it will qualify for the additional 10¢ per gallon small ethanol producer tax credit on the first 15 million gallons a year it produces.

Range Fuels is also no doubt hoping on passage of H.R. 5351, which would provide an additional 50¢ per gallon tax credit for each gallon of qualified cellulosic fuel production -- in addition to the other tax credits mentioned above. This bill has already been passed in the House. It now goes on to be voted on in the Senate.

These are only my personal opinions.

Some facts:

-90% of all food produced on the planet is consumed locally; stories about the impact of international prices on the food security of people are mostly political rant

-75% of the world's poor are farmers (who benefit from rising food prices, but are in trouble because of high oil prices; luckily for them, biofuels can limit the damage)

-biofuels have reduced food prices (especially in a country like Brazil, where it has really had a huge deflationary impact; no wonder, since ethanol there costs less than $40 per BOE; and sugar prices have not seen any significant rise because of ethanol

-cellulosic ethanol is the way forward; it's a ridiculous bourgeois fantasy to think that the huge masses in the developing world can afford a battery-powered car or an inefficient thing like a hybrid; the vast masses of the rapidly growing global lower middle class are going to buy dirt-cheap Tata Nano-style cars that cost 1500 euros.

-stupid ideas like battery-powered mobility or solar power must be abandoned; even wind cannot compete with biomass as an affordable and sustainable CO2 offsetting technology

-people continuously talk about subsidies for bioenergy, but they always fail to mention the subsidies for the other renewables, which have been much larger

-virtually all other renewables face the huge problems of not being capable of delivering realistic and economically viable baseloads; biomass overcomes this problem as it is stored solar energy; crops are factories that produce energy storage materials; biomass can be traded and moved physically and used on demand; this is a huge advantage over other renewables

In short, Khosla makes some good points. The silly, irrational war against biofuels must end.

Like Lula says: "those who work against biofuels are committing crimes against the poor and the planet." He's 100% correct.

Whether or not 90% of all food produced on the planet is consumed locally, the world operates in a globalized market. As international prices rise, so do the prices for basic foodstuffs, like bread, cornmeal, rice and eggs, especially for the hundreds of millions of urban poor, and landless rural families, around the world.

Please be more precise, and provide a source for, your comment that "75% of the world's poor are farmers". I suspect, for one, that many of the people you are counting are not farmers per se, but live in rural areas, generally making ends meet by selling their labor to those who actually own the land. And many, if not most, of the small farmers are nonetheless net food importers. Look again at Joachim von Braun's presentation, particularly slide No. 21. There are as many landless rural poor as urban poor at threat of malnutrition and starvation as a result of current food prices.

Your claim that biofuels have reduced food prices is pretty astonishing, Jonas. Even in Brazil, it is hard to imagine ethanol reducing food prices, since the price of oil should provide a floor under which sugar prices do not drop. (That was part of the point of their diversifying into ethanol production in the first place!) Yes, research on cane has helped improve yields of that crop over the long term, but that is a different argument. And please explain how it has reduced prices for other food staples. In any case, what VK was defending in the interview was a U.S. policy in which 85% of the subsidies are not going into research but simply into supporting current production from corn.

Meanwhile, others, like the head of the World Food Program, are warning that the situation is so dire that it is tantamount to a "silent tsunami" that could plunge 100 million people who previously did not require help to buy food into hunger and poverty. Still sanguin, Jonas?

I agree that it is ridiculous to think that people in the developing world are going to be able to afford hybrid vehicles in the near or even medium term, though some may be able to afford hybrid buses. But most people in least-developed countries are not going to be able to afford flex-fuel cars or compression-ignition (diesel) cars either. They can, nonetheless, benefit from improvements in battery technologies. Already there are villages in Africa that use storage batteries -- some recharged by village-scale solar panels -- to run their lighting and radios.

It is not a "failure" not to mention subsidies to other renewables whem talking about subsidies to biofuels. For one, those other renewable-energy sources have little effect on food markets (and in many cases any effect is likely to be positive -- e.g., through the provision of electricity for keeping food cool). For another, the subsidies are highly relevant to claims by people like VK who claim that "cheap, cellulosic ethanol" is just around the corner.

Seven years ago I had lunch with a VP from Iogen. Back then, cheap cellulosic ethanol was "just around the corner". It still is. I wish the industry well. But we should recognize that it is the interest of venture capitalists to exaggerate progress, and to avoid discussions of how much of their "success" is actually due to subsidies.

That is not to say that bio-energy has no place; not at all. The projects that, I believe, you are involved with, Jonas, to promote bio-char, seem to make a lot of sense. But it would be silly to pretend that they are going to solve the current food crisis in the short term.

To paraphrase you, the silly, irrational defense of current biofuel policies must end. People like you should see that those who criticize the current policies are not condemning all biomass derived energy, but are concerned with the ACTUAL distortions that current policies are doing to the world RIGHT NOW.

These are only my personal opinions.

How does this relate to biofuels?

I think it is fair to say that the rise in food prices is the consequence of speculation, of a rush into commodities (as a consequence of the weak dollar), of increased consumption and of high oil prices.

Can anyone explain the 80% price increase of cacao? Of coffee?

To answer some of Ron's points:

1. The World Food Program is largely responsible for the current situation. The cynicism of these international institutions borders on the criminal. For years, the WFP has been the satrape of European and American producers, and cut deals to have them dump their food, and to keep local populations dependent on aid. It has helped ruin local agriculture.

The true crime is that the international institutions have neglected rural development and agriculture for decades. Neoliberal programs and structural adjustment has destroyed agriculture in the South, and today, suddenly, the World Bank and the IMF want to change this.

Everyone had seen the weakness of the international food system long ago. The WFP and the international institutions did nothing to change this situation.

Now that the WFP suddenly needs much more food, it finds that its main suppliers - those of the US and the EU - have turned part of their stocks into biofuels or that prices have shot up as a consequence of growing consumption in Asia.

Had the WFP insisted on buying food from the regions where it helps, then we wouldn't be having this crisis, because the impossibility to source food there would have exposed the insanity of the situation. This would have provoked outrage and consequent investments in local agriculture.

So I'm not sanguin when the WFP talks about a "silent tsunami". On the contrary, I hold it responsible.

2. In any case, it is good to see that the major powers of this world are suddenly waking up to the need for more investments in agriculture in the South. This is a good thing, even though these powers are responsible for any deaths that are occuring today because of this temporary crisis.

3. About the subsidies for renewables: I agree that it's not wrong to be silent about the mass subsidies for wind or solar; it is merely hypocritical.

Even in the wealthy west, high oil prices are beginning to have catastrophic effects on households; they push up prices for all goods and services. The mass subsidies for solar and wind should be abandoned and reinvested in biofuels and bioenergy research instead. Wind and solar have no impact on oil prices; biofuels do.

3. Cellulosic ethanol is here today. Choren is producing FT-biofuels at $65 a barrel.

4. About biochar; it's not me who's involved, but a collegue of mine. I think it's a small technology that could make some sense in the tropics. But it faces stiff competition from other concepts, like avoided deforestation.

5. How to solve the food crisis? The crisis can be solved by having the West pay for its crimes: its neglect of agriculture in the South. So yes, aid should be doubled and the WFP supplied with fresh money.

The temporary crisis obviously needs solving, but after that, Reason must rule. Not the crazy logic that has led to the current situation.

It is really insane to see a country like the DRCongo, which can feed 3 billion people (there are good studies about this), being a net food importer. This is really mindboggling. And the example can be replicated across the South.

But I think we can all agree that the crisis is not about a lack of carrying capacity. The planet can easily feed 40 billion people in a sustainable manner, provided basic science, working markets and rational use of natural resources is practised.

The question is: why are so many developing countries who should be mass food exporters, currently net food importers?

I assumed that there was no cost penalty associated with ethanol (no subsidies).

I assumed a simple linear relationship between supply and demand--if the supply of gas increased 6.5 billion gallons from ethanol (without a cost penalty) you would see a linear decrease in price of gas.

Case 1) Free ethanol blended into gas supply
Case 2) Accounts for energy used to make ethanol
Case 3) Accounts for lower mileage of ethanol
Case 4) Accounts for Case 2 and Case 3 combined

The reduction in gas prices would be:

Case 1) 2.56%
Case 2) 1.97%
Case 3) 1.79%
Case 4) 1.38%

But ethanol isn't free and actually cost Americans 3.3 billion dollars this year because they are also paying a great deal to subsidize it with their taxes. A ten gallon tank of gas with 10% ethanol got a 51 cent tax break. Add that 51 cents back to the cost of your tank of gas. I'm ignoring all of the other ag subsidies.

Ethanol's impact on American gas prices is somewhat irrelevant in light of the fact, as Ron explained above, that Americans are not the ones going hungry. If the reduction in our gas prices from ethanol were real it would not help the poor now starting to go hungry. And if VK's admonitions that diverting 35,000 square miles of our crops to our cars had no impact on world food prices could possibly be right, let's not forget that our corn ethanol is also destroying biodiversity via crop displacement, exacerbating the Gulf dead zone, and increasing global warming through a combination of carbon sink destruction and nitrous oxide release.

There is also something wrong with his claim that a 15% hike in gas prices has a bigger impact than diverting 25% of our crops to our tanks because that 15% hike also applies to those crops we diverted to our tanks.

1. Ethanol produced in 2007 = 6,480,000,000 gallons (A)
   
2. Gasoline consumed in 2007 = 252,971,900,500 gallons (B)
   
3. EROI of ethanol in 2007 = 1.3 (C)
   
4. Decrease in mileage = 30% (D)

This is very good, because EMBRAPA, the agency doing this, will share technologies with Ghana.

Sadly, the rural Ghanese have chosen no longer to be involved in agriculture and have left for the cities, so they will not benefit directly.

According to Kofi Dartey, director of New Rice for Africa (NERI), himself a Ghanaian, his fellow countrymen "choose to live in poverty", because they refuse to grow their own rice. Instead, they want imported rice from Thailand, which is now very expensive.

Ghana's 'hybrid' rice dilemma
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7350856.stm

Dartey says things a European would never even dare to suggest. Ghanaians "choose" to go hungry...

In any case, Ghanaians are leaving the country-side, where hundreds of thousands of hectares of depleted soils are now available (they might soon return, when they see the big profits that can be made in agriculture, even by small-holders, now that prices are at all time highs).

But they may come too late: big agribusiness will use these soils to grow energy crops.

The good thing, though, is that the sugarcane will replenish the soils and sequester huge amounts of carbon dioxide in them (apart from offsetting CO2 from gasoline), it will bring Ghanaians dirt-cheap fuel (because part of it remains in the country), and it makes Sweden - already the smartest and greenest EU member state - even greener and less dependent on oil.

Another good thing is that the Ghanaian state receives a good bit of income from the taxes on the exports, and world-leading agricultural expertise from EMBRAPA.

The planet can easily feed 40 billion people in a sustainable manner

Experienced blog observers eventually learn not to pay a lot of attention to participants who don't go to the trouble to back up their claims with reliable links to sources. You have (typically) provided not a single link to back up anything you have said. We are forced to take everything you say with a big grain of salt. In light of the current food crisis, I'm appalled that you continue to downplay biofuels role in it.

Can anyone explain the following: the price of rice in Asia has soared from $460 a ton on 3 March to more than $1,000 seven weeks later.
How does this relate to biofuels?

That's a strawman. Nobody, and I mean nobody here has ever claimed that all increases in food prices (or metals for that matter) are the direct result of biofuels and biofuels alone. They are one of the major reasons for it because they are making another demand on a limited resource. We can't control the weather, or speculation, or oil prices, or what people choose to eat, but by demanding that our governments end mandates for biofuels would get rid of one of the biggest players.

I think it is fair to say that the rise in food prices is the consequence of speculation, of a rush into commodities (as a consequence of the weak dollar), of increased consumption and of high oil prices.

You are parroting what everyone has already said, except, look, you left biofuels out of your list again. And I think it's fair to say that you forgot to mention biofuels are also a major reason for that speculation, considering that 35,000 square miles of corn went to American gas tanks this year. That really stuck it to American chicken farmers among many others.

Can anyone explain the 80% price increase of cacao? Of coffee?

Sure. I'll just repeat what I said above:

That's a strawman. Nobody, and I mean nobody here has ever claimed that all increases in food prices (or metals for that matter) are the direct result of biofuels and biofuels alone. They are one of the major reasons for it because they are making another demand on a limited resource. We can't control the weather, or speculation, or oil prices, or what people choose to eat, but by demanding that our governments end mandates for biofuels would get rid of one of the biggest players.

The World Food Program is largely responsible for the current situation. The cynicism of these international institutions borders on the criminal. For years, the WFP has been the satrape of European and American producers, and cut deals to have them dump their food, and to keep local populations dependent on aid. It has helped ruin local agriculture.

Proponents of fuels that are exacerbating hunger and the rape of the earth are calling this organization cynical and criminal?

That's what I would call a run of the mill conspiracy theory. Here is how famine works. All it takes is a few weeks where food supply fails, to irreparably damage children's protein hungry brains, and just few weeks more to kill them. It all happens in the blink of an eye. Response has to be rapid. Food has to get to the starving quickly. Any number of things can kick a population into a state of famine, high prices, locusts, blight, drought, war, bad governance, you name it. Their job is to run around the world snuffing famine whenever it raises its ugly head, not to create functional governments. That would be the job of the functional government creation organizations.

The true crime is that the international institutions have neglected rural development and agriculture for decades. Neoliberal programs and structural adjustment has destroyed agriculture in the South, and today, suddenly, the World Bank and the IMF want to change this.

Everyone had seen the weakness of the international food system long ago. The WFP and the international institutions did nothing to change this situation.

I think its great they you have pinpointed all of the problems, labeled all of the evil doers, and in general have all of the answers to pull the South out of its poverty, but as I have pointed out to you many times before, without good governance, improvement will remain elusive. You need to find a way to fix that to fix anything. The poor can't grow enough food to feed themselves because subsistence farming is a difficult and tenuous way to live and the surpluses needed to survive crop failures are almost impossible to consistently maintain. Forms of agriculture that consistently generate enough surpluses to trade on the world market require an intact social and economic structure, which can only happen with good governance.

Now that the WFP suddenly needs much more food, it finds that its main suppliers - those of the US and the EU - have turned part of their stocks into biofuels or  and that prices have shot up as a consequence of growing consumption in Asia.

OK. You finally begrudgingly admit that our biofuel policy is part of the problem.

Had the WFP insisted on buying food from the regions where it helps, then we wouldn't be having this crisis, because the impossibility to source food there would have exposed the insanity of the situation. This would have provoked outrage and consequent investments in local agriculture.

Let me see if I got this right. If the WFP had tried to buy grain where none is grown, instead of getting as much food as possible for the money available by buying the lowest priced food available on world markets, this would have created outrage across the planet, thus motivating citizens to demand that their governments invest in African agriculture.

I don't think so.

In any case, it is good to see that the major powers of this world are suddenly waking up to the need for more investments in agriculture in the South. This is a good thing, even though these powers are responsible for any deaths that are occuring today because of this temporary crisis

Supporters of present biofuel policies share the responsibility for this crisis.

About the subsidies for renewables: I agree that it's not wrong to be silent about the mass subsidies for wind or solar; it is merely hypocritical.

I'm not a big proponent of most subsidies, but pots should not be calling kettles black, you, you,  "supporter of biofuel mandates that are destroying the planet and starving children", you  : )

We all know that bioenergy is the only renewable that makes sense for most of the developing world. So it is our duty to support this sector more than any other.

Actually not. I grow weary posting links to the wetlands, grasslands, and rainforests being plowed under for cane and soy. Destroying the planet won't save the planet. All evidence today points to today's biofuels being worse than alternatives. Enslaving the poor of the world as sun baked farm hands on giant industrial agrofuel farms to feed first world cars strikes some of us as being a really bad idea.

Even in the wealthy west, high oil prices are beginning to have catastrophic effects on households; they push up prices for all goods and services. The mass subsidies for solar and wind should be abandoned and reinvested in biofuels and bioenergy research instead. Wind and solar have no impact on oil prices; biofuels do.

Here is a reality check for you. Roughly 25% of our corn crop reduced our gasoline use roughly 1%. It reduced our total oil use even less. High oil prices affect primarily transportation. Doubling gas mileage would allow gas prices to go to $7 a gallon without further impact. That is where the money should be going. Simply replacing oil in today's cars and trucks with biofuels is another really bad idea.

Cellulosic ethanol is here today. Choren is producing FT-biofuels at $65 a barrel.

You are going to have a hard time proving that.

It is really insane to see a country like the DRCongo, which can feed 3 billion people (there are good studies about this), being a net food importer. This is really mindboggling. And the example can be replicated across the South.

Only by sending carbon sinks into the atmosphere. I'd be happy seeing congo farmers compete with American farmers. How exactly do you make that happen? Growing fuel there for fat Americans instead of food will just double the burden on the biosphere.

The temporary crisis obviously needs solving, but after that, Reason must rule. Not the crazy logic that has led to the current situation.

You mean feeding food to cars? And we will see how temporary this is as biofuel mandates increase and world population grows 50%.

The question is: why are so many developing countries who should be mass food exporters, currently net food importers?

The answer to that question is obvious. They don't have functional governance. The answer to that problem is obviously not so obvious. How many times have we had this same discussion?


In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

Just one additional comment, on rice. A couple of weeks ago, U.S. News & World Report provided a good analysis of the current situation:

Since the first of the year, additional jumps in food prices [i.e., beyond those caused by "record fuel prices, ethanol production, unprecedented demand, the effects of climate change"] have bred not only uneasiness and widespread fear but also, in recent weeks, extreme responses. Countries in Asia and South America are clamping down on exports or banning them, often at the behest of panic-stricken leaders worried about inflation. Further down the supply chain, savvy farmers and producers are hoarding food to delay its sale. In a sense, the unfolding scene is a sort of "prisoner's dilemma" known in game theory: Individuals (and individual countries) are moving to protect their own interests--"defecting" rather than cooperating--as supplies become more precious.

The effect, some analysts say, has been to drive the market cost of food--rice and wheat, in particular--even higher and to further destabilize countries at risk of violence and hunger. "A lot of these countries [with bans] have poor populations, and they're worried about inflation, and they know that if they keep supplies high, they can lower costs," said U.S. Department of Agriculture economist Andy Aaronson. "That's just supply-and-demand economics, but it's a psychology that's going to have to break."

...

Rice, which is the staple food for roughly half of the world's population, or more than 3 billion people, has been particularly affected. China, Vietnam, and Egypt have imposed limits on the amount of rice they will export. India, at the end of March, banned "non-basmati" rice shipments outright and has continued to ratchet up the minimum price of basmati exports, which are known for their higher quality. Thailand, the world's largest rice exporter, is reportedly flirting with the idea of doing the same, even as its farmers toil to plant a third crop of rice this year, one more than usual. Wheat, too, has seen the scythe of political maneuvering: Last week, Russia extended for 60 days a ban on wheat exports. China and Argentina have adopted restrictions; in Pakistan, where farmers have just begun to harvest the annual wheat crop, officials yesterday said the country most likely will fall millions of acres below the expected goal, prompting the government to dispatch soldiers to guard grain elevators. "Now that the market is so nervous, governments get more nervous," said Joachim von Braun, director general at the International Food Policy Research Institute. "In addition to export bans, they try to build up storage to be on the safe side, and governments become part of the speculators."

A correspondent who follows commodity markets wrote to me, "Most countries in Asia intervene in rice markets to one degree or another, including protecting domestic production, so it is a very thinly traded commodity, which in turn makes the "world" price highly volatile to any shock. The link to wheat is apparently that India had a bad harvest and so restricted rice exports to substitute rice for wheat in domestic food aid programs."

So, in short, as BioD says. There are factors other than biofuels that explain the particular case of rice. Still, the general tightness of the food market is a contributing psychological factor to the panicy, "beggar thy neighbour" policies being adopted by a growing list of countries.

These are only my personal opinions.

Let me start by highlighting one of your concluding remarks so that everybody knows where you are coming from:

The planet can easily feed 40 billion people in a sustainable manner

Experienced blog observers eventually learn not to pay a lot of attention to participants who don't go to the trouble to back up their claims with reliable links to sources. You have (typically) provided not a single link to back up anything you have said. We are forced to take everything you say with a big grain of salt.

Fair point, I'm not an "experienced blog observer". I thought that these things were well known amongst the public at large. Apparently they are not.

The assessment about the carrying capacity comes from the world's leading agricultural experts. Professor Dr Ir Rudy Rabbinge (needs no intro, does he? If he does: he's chair of the Science Council of the CGIAR, board member of AGRA - Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa -, co-chair of the InterAcademy Council, etc... also probably the next FAO boss, and dean of Wageningen, the world's leading agronomic university; been Chairman of the United Nations Panel on Food Security and Agricultural Productivity, etc... how's that for an authority argument), has had a lecture about this for years.

It is perhaps one of the most often quoted lectures about the future of global agriculture.

Feeding 40 billion people and the Green Revolution in Africa

In light of the current food crisis, I'm appalled that you continue to downplay biofuels role in it.

And I'm appalled by the irrationality of this discussion. It is exactly this irrationality which has killed tends of millions of people in the past, and which has ruined agriculture in the South.

The war against biofuels - if successful - will kill hundreds of millions people, who saw biofuels as their only shot at tapping new agricultural opportunities. They have tried cotton for your jeans, but your government cheated; they have tried baby maize for your birthday parties, but prices collapsed; they have tried flowers for your granny, but the Dutch cheated. Biofuels, at last, bring hope to the world's farmers in the South, because here they have a clear competitive advantage, based solely on agroecological factors.  

At last, a sector in which they cannot be beaten. And you want to destroy it! Lula is right: this is a crime against humanity.

Discarding biofuel would be 'crime against humanity': Lula

Lula is right.

Can anyone explain the following: the price of rice in Asia has soared from $460 a ton on 3 March to more than $1,000 seven weeks later.
    How does this relate to biofuels?

That's a strawman. Nobody, and I mean nobody here has ever claimed that all increases in food prices (or metals for that matter) are the direct result of biofuels and biofuels alone. They are one of the major reasons for it because they are making another demand on a limited resource. We can't control the weather, or speculation, or oil prices, or what people choose to eat, but by demanding that our governments end mandates for biofuels would get rid of one of the biggest players.

So you're not really answering the question, because the answer debunks your logic.

Rice is not used for biofuels in any big way.

So, to make your case a bit credible and to pinpoint the impact of biofuels on rice, you would have to be able to prove that:

-the increase in corn prices (corn is used massively for biofuels)
-and the decrease in sugar prices (sugar is used massively biofuels)
-is a factor in causing the sudden doubling of rice prices over this single past month

Go ahead, prove it. The fact that you can't, and the fact that you can't for all the other farm commodities, proves that your logic is flawed.

It would be fairer of you to say that some biofuels have had a minimal impact on the price of some agricultural commodities, and that some biofuels have had no effect at all (sugarcane ethanol) and that biofuels are a micro-factor in the general upward trend.

But see below, the fact that you don't understand the causes of this general upward trend, proves that your war against biofuels is grossly incredible.

And I think it's fair to say that you forgot to mention biofuels are also a major reason for that speculation, considering that 35,000 square miles of corn went to American gas tanks this year. That really stuck it to American chicken farmers among many others.

Mm, not sure what you're trying to say here. Who's speculating? The chicken farmers? The corn farmers? The commodity traders? I don't know what you're trying to say.

Can anyone explain the 80% price increase of cacao? Of coffee?

Sure. I'll just repeat what I said above:

See, your failure to answer this question shows that you actually are not well aware of what's at play.

The point is that all commodities have shot up. This is no coincidence, and it proves that there is something rather different going on, than biofuels.

(This is also why Merkel, or the EU, can bluntly state: biofuels have nothing to do with increased food prices. They really say it that bluntly, because it is so obvious.)

The fact that uranium, copper, coffee, cocoa, coltan, rice, - name any commodity - have shot up, proves that biofuels are not in any way an important factor.

The leading cause is the weak dollar, which pushes investors into commodities.

Investors have nothing else to invest in, so they play the safe route: oil, farm commodities and metals.

The case of rice illustrates this beautifully. Rice harvests are not particularly bad, and adverse weather can never explain the sudden doubling of prices. Increased consumption plays a role. The oil price plays an important role too, but is not enough either to explain the doubling. Biofuels of course play no role whatsoever (see above), so you can only deduce that speculation into commodities must be the main cause. And it is, because of the crappy dollar and the miserable state of the U.S. economy.

(Nota bene, the weak dollar is partly the result of the $1 trillion Iraq War, waged over oil; another reason to promote biofuels - so we don't have to go to this insane dollar crisis which is killing so many people and dragging the entire world down, ever again.)

Proponents of fuels that are exacerbating hunger and the rape of the earth are calling this organization cynical and criminal?

But why do you keep repeating your mantra? You might begin to believe it too.

-biofuels push down food prices, or at least help in keeping them lower (just wait until oil goes to $150, then you'll get the clue).

-biofuels restore ecosystems and protect pristine environments (because they allow farmers and poor people to make a better income and offer States a way to stop draining their treasuries as a consequence of spending everything on oil, - which in turn allows all these actors to invest in more sustainable agriculture; perpetuating misery on the contrary would be grossly unsustainable; poverty and high fertility rates are the leading cause of environmental destruction; and biofuels can help reverse both)

-biofuels save the planet by reducing CO2 emissions

-biofuels prevent the world from total collapse as a result of Peak Oil

So biofuels can save not only the poor and the hungry, they can also save the planet environmentally, and prevent all out social war resulting from Peak Oil. Not bad, I would say.

That's what I would call a run of the mill conspiracy theory. Here is how famine works. All it takes is a few weeks where food supply fails, to irreparably damage children's protein hungry brains, and just few weeks more to kill them. It all happens in the blink of an eye. Response has to be rapid. Food has to get to the starving quickly. Any number of things can kick a population into a state of famine, high prices, locusts, blight, drought, war, bad governance, you name it. Their job is to run around the world snuffing famine whenever it raises its ugly head, not to create functional governments. That would be the job of the functional government creation organizations.

But you are obscenely abusing a crisis as a way to attack a proposition that can offer a permanent solution to weak agricultural systems - namely biofuels.

This is the real obscenity - your constant misuse of a crisis. I'm disgusted.

We need structural solutions to poverty, and biofuels is one of the surest bets.

So stop abusing this crisis as a way to refuse the search for structural approaches.

without good governance, improvement will remain elusive.

That's stating the obvious. Good governance is an over-arching theme. But you should not use this obvious theme as a way to camouflage the equally important issues of agricultural subsidies in the North, of unfair market rules, etc...

There are many fairly well governed countries in the South, whose agricultural opportunities get lost because of these other factors.

The poor can't grow enough food to feed themselves because subsistence farming is a difficult and tenuous way to live and the surpluses needed to survive crop failures are almost impossible to consistently maintain. Forms of agriculture that consistently generate enough surpluses to trade on the world market require an intact social and economic structure, which can only happen with good governance.

Yes, and you know what? The international institutions have perpetuated bad governance.

You probably know the story of Malawi's corn harvests. It succeeded in producing three bumper harvests in a row, by kicking the WFP out, because the WFP is an organisation that cannot be taken seriously: it promotes US/EU farmers and opens markets for them by creating dependency.

In Malawi, they kicked out all the international institutions (who said: don't subsidise farm inputs), and all the NGOs who are deemed irrational (and who said: Malawians must use organic farming.)

Instead, Malawi did the exact contrary of the advice coming from the West. It subsidized fertilizers for its farmers and gave them quality seeds. The result was a doubling of maize outputs and Malawi became a net maize food exporter instead of a miserable begging bowl.

Malawi can now double outputs again by investing in simple things like infrastructures and access to better outputs and inputs. And so, imagine it becomes a leading exporting nation, then it will encounter the obscenity of the international trade rules.

The point I'm trying to make is that international institutions play a key role in perpetuating bad governance in the South. It's too easy to blame the leaders of the South alone.

Let me see if I got this right. If the WFP had tried to buy grain where none is grown, instead of getting as much food as possible for the money available by buying the lowest priced food available on world markets, this would have created outrage across the planet, thus motivating citizens to demand that their governments invest in African agriculture.

Exactly!

I don't think so.

I do think so.

In my country, Belgium, there was outrage over the fact that the WFP in Congo sourced maize from Europe, while local farmers were pushed out of the market because of this.

The pressure from civil society organisations was so great, that the WFP decided to stop the imports and was forced to provide seed and fertilizer to the local farmers, so the WFP could source local food. It now does.

So, yes, I think so.

The point was merely that the food aid industry in general has played a very negative and hypocritical role in the South. The money spent on imported food to solve the crises that keep coming back, is much better invested in local agriculture so as to offer a permanent solution.

I think this speaks for itself.

For those who can read Dutch, here is a brilliant piece about the immense hypocrisy and cynicism of the WFP and the international institutions in the current food crisis:

'Cynisme rond voedselcrisis nauwelijks te overtreffen'

Actually not. I grow weary posting links to the wetlands, grasslands, and rainforests being plowed under for cane and soy. Destroying the planet won't save the planet.

There is not a single tree being cut down for biofuels. On the contrary, millions of trees are being planted for bioenergy on formerly destroyed and depleted land, where they contribute in fighting desertification and erosion. They're even greening the desert in Inner Mongolia with energy crops.

All evidence today points to today's biofuels being worse than alternatives. Enslaving the poor of the world as sun baked farm hands on giant industrial agrofuel farms to feed first world cars strikes some of us as being a really bad idea.

Take the Pro-Biodiesel program in Brazil. It has lifted 75,000 of the country's poorest people out of poverty, allows their children to go to school, has abolished hunger amongst them, etc.... These farmers work in the semi-arid Nordeste. Not a tree in sight. Biofuels makes their environment green, and provides them a livelihood.

This is really a good idea. Saving the planet and its people is actually a good thing.

Planting more trees, restoring destroyed environments, helping the poor survive, - these are all good things.

It is really insane to see a country like the DRCongo, which can feed 3 billion people (there are good studies about this), being a net food importer. This is really mindboggling. And the example can be replicated across the South.

Only by sending carbon sinks into the atmosphere. I'd be happy seeing congo farmers compete with American farmers. How exactly do you make that happen? Growing fuel there for fat Americans instead of food will just double the burden on the biosphere.

I really invite you to travel to Kasaï , Katanga or Bandundu to tell people there they can't cut down trees. They will laugh because the Kasaï is a savannah.

But I know you are the first one to admit that you don't really have a grasp of non-American geography. It probably has to do, as you say, with the limited brain capacities of Americans as a consequence of their high fat consumption - which you referred to.

Common dude, the Congo is larger than its forest, stop being so petty by always shifting the focus of the debate. This is really false of you; it's a dirty trick used by many nowadays - if you can't win the argument, just use the threat of the rainforest. Stop playing a false game, it's getting boring.

Just replace Congo with Mozambique or Angola or Zimbabwe or Zambia or Tanzania or the Central African Republic or South Sudan or any country without a major rainforest, and which only uses less than 5-10% of its arable land base.

You get the clue. There's quite a bit of agricultural potential in Africa. But you just don't want to know. And each time this pops up, you reduce the entire continent to its rainforest.  This trick won't work for long, better get a new one.

Moreover, I suspect that you are someone who shouts that Africans must preserve their (or better: your romantic views on their) environment, while forgetting that they also must make a living. I have often suspected some kind of "green racism" at work here. It's a topic I'm going to investigate. Many Europeans and Americans talk about other people's environment, while forgetting that there are actually people living there.

Is this the new "green imperialism"? I'm beginning to think so.

However, one small point (to sooth the green imperialist): the key to use Africa's potential is by restoring its environment. Hundreds of millions of hectares of land have been depleted and exhausted there as a result of primitive, pre-modern agriculture. AGRA (Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa) will help restore this land. Likewise, biofuels and energy crops will help revive this environment by planting crops to fend off catastrophic erosion, desertification, soil and water depletion, etc... it's all going to happen in Africa.

But you will keep shouting: Africans must shut up and stop touching their soils and their natural resources, because I, green bourgeois imperialist, want my Africa to be like it is represented in my coffee table photobook about Africa. Sorry, you're going to be disappointed.

The temporary crisis obviously needs solving, but after that, Reason must rule. Not the crazy logic that has led to the current situation.

You mean feeding food to cars? And we will see how temporary this is as biofuel mandates increase and world population grows 50%.

No, by making people survive.

And what you still don't seem to understand is that biofuels are a precondition to grow more food. This, you will see more and more. Without access to cheap liquid fuels, economies don't work, agricultural production collapses. Without a fight against climate change, agricultural production declines - and biofuels are the only way to reduce the massive CO2 output of the transport sector (please don't give me EV's, they are not realistic, especially not in the rapidly developing world).

The good thing about biofuels is that they are an agricultural product: this means poor farmers can make more money, which they can at last invest in improving food production, the sine-qua non for feeding the world. A farmer of today improves production with knowledge and better inputs; he needs money to do so. Biofuels bring in this cash. It's absolutely crucial.

Without biofuels, feeding the world will be much more difficult.

On an ending note, but this might shock you, it doesn't really matter whether an African farmer sells cotton for your jeans, baby maize for your girlfriend's birthday party, flowers for your granny, or biofuels for your car. As long as he makes money, then he's safe and can he expand and improve his food production. Do you understand this very, very basic idea?

The war against biofuels - if successful - will kill hundreds of millions people, who saw biofuels as their only shot at tapping new agricultural opportunities. They have tried cotton for your jeans, but your government cheated; they have tried baby maize for your birthday parties, but prices collapsed; they have tried flowers for your granny, but the Dutch cheated. Biofuels, at last, bring hope to the world's farmers in the South, because here they have a clear competitive advantage, based solely on agroecological factors.

War against biofuels? You are conflating criticisms of current policies with criticisms of biofuels full stop. If biofuels were competing with other means of providing propulsion, without the government mandates, then the discussion we would be having would be very different. No government (except perhaps in a developing country, mirroring the recent export restrictions on grains) is going to prevent farmers selling their cane or corn to biofuel processors. So any notion that you have of criticism of biofuels leading to bans on biofuels is just plain silly.

There are some people who can never imagine any good biofuel, but that is not from where most people are coming.

Many are rightly concerned about the collateral damage, including for the environment, from over-exuberant promotion of biofuels, however. Some importing nations are trying to allay those fears by promising that they are developing sustainability standards for biofuels. But that is almost tantamount to closing the door after the horse has bolted -- adding sustainability standards AFTER they had instituted subsidies and mandates, instead of the other way around. They know, and we know, that it will be many years before those standards take effect. And they are going to have a devil of a time trying to deal with indirect effects caused by the displacement of food production.

By citing the past experiences of developing countries in producing cotton, baby maize and tulips for the North, you are only providing further evidence for the sceptics. If Big Ag and northern protectionist policies were the order of the day for those other product, what gives you so much confidence that the same model won't be repeated in the case of biofuels? Look at the foreign investments in biofuels in Brazil and Indonesia, for example: they are dominated by some of the biggest players in the business.

Sorry, but I'm not persuaded by your reverse Murphy's Law: If anything can go right (with biofuels), it will.

These are only my personal opinions.

But here is one bit of anecdotal evidence: my parents live in apple country, in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia. They have witnessed over the last several years more and more apple orchids -- including some relatively new ones -- be felled to plant corn. Was that corn used for ethanol production? Probably not. But it has become much more profitable to grow that corn thanks to policies that artificially inflate the value of corn relative to other crops.

Meanwhile, there are certainly carbon-rich and biodiversity-rich grasslands in the Dakotas being ploughed up to produce crops for biofuels. Here is one example "Biofuels Could Create the 'Perfect Storm'". But let's listen to a more authoritative source, the U.S. General Accountability Office, from a recent report, issued last September:

The most common use to which grassland has been converted is cropland for the production of crops such as corn and wheat. This cropland produces food, feed, and fiber--and now, with the rising demand for ethanol and other renewable fuels, energy--and can yield relatively high financial returns to landowners and agricultural producers. However, grassland is also a valuable resource, providing land for livestock grazing; recreational opportunities, such as hunting and fishing; and environmental benefits, such as reducing soil erosion, improving water quality, increasing carbon sequestration, and providing wildlife habitat. In particular, some grassland provides habitat for threatened and endangered and other at-risk species. Converting grassland to cropland reduces or eliminates these benefits, and can result in additional spending on federal farm programs. [My emphasis]

Meanwhile, tell me you have not heard about the controversy in Uganda, where it was reported a year ago that the president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, was "pressing ahead with plans to give a large chunk of one of the country's last protected forests to a sugar cane company so it can expand its operations."

I am not disputing that there may also be examples of where bio-energy projects (more for producing solid fuel or charcoal than for liquid fuels, no?) have encouraged reforestation. But to assert that "there is not a single tree being cut down for biofuels" is an incredible -- and certainly hard to prove -- claim.

These are only my personal opinions.

We have practical ways to solve this climate crisis in time.  Let's talk about that.

Let the skeptics and sophists have their own discussions.  Plenty of mass media hosting of this nonsense already.

Just say no.  Let the wing nuts sit and spin on their own nut wing sites.

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Rudy Rabbinge, professor in sustainable development and food security at the Wageningen University, concluded in his presentation on 18 December 2006 for the Koninklijke Landbouwkundige Vereniging that current biofuel crops are not efficient energy producers and require vast surfaces of arable land that will not be available for other purposes, such as food production. He strongly pleaded for the development of C4 crops (trees and biomass producers) that are more efficient energy converters, limited production of crops such as Jathropha in developing countries, and the valorization of waste. [My emphasis]

More recently, Prof. Rabbinge has had this to say about biofuels:

"Fuel for the rich or food for the poor?" was how Rudy Rabbinge, professor of sustainable development at Wageningen University, put this dilemma at a debate on biomass from developing countries in The Hague in March 2007. Rabbinge believes that biofuel and food are incompatible. In his opinion, only unused plant remains should be used to generate energy, provided that it meets the sustainability criteria set out by the Cramer Commission, chaired by Professor Jacqueline Cramer of the University of Utrecht, now the Dutch environment minister. In other words, biofuel production must not involve the loss of agricultural land, and it must not threaten food production, biodiversity, or the welfare of workers. Above all, it must have a positive impact on CO2 emissions, according to a life-cycle analysis.

Rabbinge believes that biofuels are unlikely to help reduce CO2 emissions to a significant extent. "You need artificial fertilizer to grow potatoes", he explained in a telephone interview, "and it takes energy to grow and transport the elements of the fertilizer. So the net reduction in CO2 emissions from converting starch to ethanol is very small." [My emphasis.]

Even I wouldn't go so far as to say that biofuel and food are incompatible. (Perhaps he was quoted out of context.) But I'm not the probable next head of the FAO, either.

These are only my personal opinions.

I never said we can both feed growing populations and replace all oil with food-based biofuels.

I said separate things:

1. the planet can feed 40 billion people
   
2. the role of current biofuels in the current food crisis is marginal
   
3. the future is in second, third and fourth generation biofuels
   
4. the developing countries will first use internal combustion engined cars, they will not leapfrog, and so they will use biofuels

But what I said about professor Rabbinge is what he said: the world has a carrying capacity to feed 40 billion people.

From what he says, I don't see that biofuels play a major part in this crisis. Seems like high oil prices are the key driver, and are only now beginning to be translated into higher food prices.

Check c-span under "Offenheiser".

Just checking.

So do we all agree then that we need to invest more in agriculture in developing countries?

Yes, at least in my case.

These are only my personal opinions.

Why would that be?  Because it's easier to build biofuel refineries than put up PV panels?

Tell me, how does biofuel, second, third whatever generation, reduce GHG?  

And if poor people can't afford solar panels, batteries, and electric motors, how will they be able to buy the parts for biofuel refineries?  Internal combustion is far more complex than electric powered vehicles.

And why would it matter if someone claims that the earth can feed 40 billion people?  I could claim the earth will support 100 billion people.  all we need is to make them eat nutritional yeast and algae, grown in floating, wave, wind, and solar powered systems in the ocean.

By multiplying the mass of the daily requirement of yeast and algae by the 100 million, then calculating how big the floating growing system would need to be.

How does that have anything to do with any argument about biofuel?  

And why would anyone want to have a bigger population on earth than we do now?

I am just not getting the fascination here Jonas.  I find what you are saying meaningless diversion from the looming reality of GHG climate disaster.  Why divert?  Why not solve the problem instead?

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But it's just not true.  Current biofuel comes from corn.  

Where have you obtained all this erroneous information Jonas?  And why do you insist it's true?  Do you maybe have a vested interest in biofuels?  

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You are one of Vinod's allies?  Were you the one who wrote the articles he posted here as his?  

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Of course, the industry failed to point out that its own subsidies would in a few years surpass those that it obviated (in the United States, that point could be reached by the middle of the next decade), but on the claim that biofuels would boost crop prices, they were certainly right.

The problem, of course, is that the industry got greedy, over built, and started pushing for even LARGER mandates. Meanwhile, apart from sugar, prices for starch-based biofuel feedstocks (corn) and oil-based feedstocks (soy, canola), and crops displaced by the expansion of those feedstocks, kept rising. But governments in the north saw that as a GOOD THING, so did nothing to slow it down.

As we now see, that train came crashing into a set of other converging factors -- like rising oil prices, like increasing taste for meat in Asia -- that were also helping to drive up commodity prices.

But now that those prices are spiraling out of control, the industry is running for cover and shouting -- "Nope, not us! It's that other guy's fault!" It was taking credit for rising crop prices just two years ago. It should stand up and admit that it is part of the problem now.

These are only my personal opinions.

Sadly, the "perfect storm" generated by other factors (insane oil prices, en masse commodity speculation, the weak dollar, growing demand for grains in Asia, bad weather in key production areas) has destroyed this vision.

The victim is biofuels. So now we must take care not to throw away the baby with the bath water (not sure whether this expression exists in English, ok).

That's why we must continue to stress the point that biofuels offer hope to the world's farmers. Once some of the pressures on food prices are removed and agricultural production expands, the initial logic to which Ron refers, might gain the upperhand again.

But I fear it is too late. The general public has wrapped its mind around the simpleton idea that 'biofuels take away food' and that it will always be so. This is of course the worst thing that could happen for the world's rural populations, whose future is tightly linked to biofuels. The damage may be irreparable - which is a catastrophy for the world's farmers, for the environment, and for our energy security.

Fuel farming. That baby ought to have been aborted long ago.

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A person who makes $1000 a year will never buy a $100,000 electric car. He will buy a second-hand flex-fuel Nano, for $1000, which he can run on locally brewed ethanol.

His government will not invest in an infrastructure for $100,000 cars which nobody buys, nor in an infrastructure that allows you to run your non-existing EV for $0.5 per kilometer, when you can use ethanol instead for $0.075 per kilometer.

This is, I think a no-brainer.

Of course, I'm all for helping the South develop more efficient mobility systems, rapidly. I'm even willing to sacrifice 1% of my mediocre yearly income to do so (the other 1% goes to HIV/AIDS, 1% to hunger, 1% to protecting whales - these are my priorities; my government takes 0.7% away from me for other development goals). The question is: are you?

What does that have to do with the GHG price of ethanol.  It doubles the GHG emissions over oil based fuel.

Electric plugin bikes and solar panels to charge them won't cost 100k per copy.  With mass production costs tend to drop.  Electric motors and batteries and solar panels have an order of magnitude fewer moving parts than internal combustion vehicles and ethanol refineries.

50 cents per km?  Uhh yeah, I guess a very inefficient ICE  car would cost that much to run on  5 dollar per litre liquid fuel.

A plugin bike would cost nothing per km.  Once the solar panels are payed for in fuel savings.  With the subsidies for solar and plugin hybrids boosted to the level of the subsidies for ICE vehicles and fuel farming and ethanol refining, that payoff period would be a few years.

No brainer?  Exactly.  Where/how did Vinod get all that cash?  

Since nearly everything he says in this interview is wrong.  

How much GHG will all those wonderful ethanol powered flex fuel nanos emit?  Double what they would emit running on oil.  How will it effect local grain prices when people who depend on commodity corn to survive have to compete against ethanol refineries run by the local warlord?

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One (point of logic) I have to bring up:  Why is it necessary that everyone in the world have a car?  Did you know that India has the world's largest rail network?  Africa seems to have a decent foundation of one as well.  The world can simply not support 9 billion cars.  And yes, I don't think cars make sense, in the long-term, for any society.  

If you don't need cars (or planes or trucks) you don't really need biofuels, except for feedstocks, so the whole rationale for biofuels disappears.  Africa has a huge amount of solar potential (I don't know about wind), as do many other areas of the planet, particularly in the Global South.  Solar technology is not so high-tech that developing countries cannot develop their own capacity to produce solar energy generating equipment, of whatever variety; in fact, it would be a huge step toward self-sufficiency and sustainable wealth if they did move toward their own production capabilities (should we get into a discussion of "dependency theory"?).

For instance, solar ovens, according to Lester Brown, are pretty low-tech, would allow millions (or billions) an affordable way to cook their food with ripping up their ecosystems.  Solar thermal is pretty straightforward.  And if Africans, or other developing nations, were able to master the technologies of the highest of the high-tech, pure silicon manufacturing, again, it would set them up for long-term sustainable wealth.

There are renewable alternatives.

The cost of decentralised solar power is currently around 20 times higher than that of biomass systems. Biomass is a hugely abundant resource, particularly in the Global South. And governments there just don't have billions to spend on a hugely costly solar infrastructure.

Moreover, the CO2 footprint of solar PV is around twice that of biomass combustion systems (EU Strategic Energy Technology Plan).

Likewise, CSP has a tremendous baseload problem, and it's a centralised concept, quite costly. I don't see any developing nation capable of installing this, let alone build manufacturing plants around this.

So I call for a bit of economic realism. Solar ovens are fun, but the people using them also want working hospitals, schools, businesses and buses. That is: they want a working electricity infrastructure capable of generating baseload power, and they want a liquid fuel infrastructure capable of providing cheap and reliable mobility.

On your other note: I'm not sure most people have a realistic view on the challenges and realities in the Global South. From what I can read, many are totally misinformed, and are indeed eurocentric and bourgeois in the extreme. Well-intentioned ideas coming from such people can often have very damaging effects. That's why it is imperative to use strong language.

Lula told Jean Ziegler - the UN's Special Rapporteur on Food - that he is a "palpiteiro", a pretty strong Luso-Brazilian term denoting "a bourgeois person who ventilates his meaning without having a clue what's he's talking about". I think he's right.

And there is of course the issue of energy security, seen by many as the most problematic threat of our times.

Oil at $225 means the mass destruction of poor people, and the certain destruction of what remains of the natural environment (because this forces people to flee the cities in search of agricultural livelihoods, while existing rural populations will fall back on primitive, extremely inefficient and destructive agriculture, sucking up land like never before.)

We can only pray for biofuels to be scaled up rapidly, so as to stave of this unthinkable catastrophy. $225 a barrel. It's just too scary.

Do you think countries in the South have more to gain by building solar power manufacturing plants that produce an inpractical form of energy technology they can't sell to their own populations (who live on less than a dollar a day) nor abroad -, factories that don't bring in jobs?

Compared with the relative ease with which they can provide ample agricultural opportunity for their huge rural populations, by building efficient and extremely cost-effective biogas plants, small gasification plants and small pyrolysers that bring electricity at a cost 20 to 30 times lower than PVs or small biofuel refineries that cut reliance on excessively expensive oil?

Both ideas cut dependency on outside factors and markets. But the first one is unrealistic, uneconomical, has no social benefits, mediocre environmental benefits and is a no-starter. Whereas the latter brings huge employment potential, is extremely environmentally and energetically efficient and is obviously the very appropriate technology for people who handle biomass anyways in their daily lives.

To put it another way: despite the worries of peak oil activists, the world would do just fine without oil, as long as the critical inputs to things like agriculture were replaced with renewable inputs.  

I don't know why expensive oil has to lead to the destruction of the remaining ecosystems, unless it's the mass planting of biofuels you're talking about, which obviously you aren't -- although that's what worries a lot people, including me.

Unfortunately, you don't seem to understand how a manufacturing system works and develops -- which means you are like the overwhelming majority of people.  You build up a manufacturing system incrementally -- although you can also build it up very quickly -- but you build it up.  You don't look at an economy and say, "well, they don't have a manufacturing infrastructure, so they can't have a manufacturing infrastructure".  If the Chinese had used that logic, their economy would be circa 1976.  

The reason developing countries are called "developing" is because they are supposed to be "developing" a manufacturing infrastructure.  In fact, unfortunately for the poorest regions such as Africa, they should really be called "undeveloped".  They are simply being sucked dry for raw materials such as oil.  Raw material development doesn't work unless it's linked to a very aggressive industrialization program.

Of course people want the basics of life.  But the basic foundation of a modern society is manufacturing, and the sooner all regions can develop manufacturing, the sooner they will be able to have a reliable source of the basics of life.

Now, if the South can use biomass for electrical generation, in an environmentally sustainable way, then that sounds great to me.  But that's not liquid biofuels, so maybe I misunderstood your argument -- my understanding is that its more efficient to produce electricity from biomass than to move vehicles with liquid biofuels.  

I think you're seriously underestimating the potential of solar (some Europeans think they can get their entire electrical output from CSP from the Sahara -- why not the Africans?) -- and it would certainly be a legitimate policy proposal for the North to give the South the resources to create the engineering talent to be able to develop solar technology, as well as biomass-generated electricity.  

So it sounds like we have more in agreement than we originally assumed.

first, if there is one big waste of money that could go into development instead, it's the US military.  Paltry subsidies to solar and wind are like gnats compared to that 600-pound gorilla (not to diss gorillas).

second, the rich nations should buy agricultural products from the poor nations, not the other way around.  If you look at Gar Lipow's comment on his recent post, he points out that Haiti used to produce 90% of their own rice, and now import 100% because of free trade policies being forced down their throats -- and I'm sure there are plenty of similar stories to tell from Africa.

Jonas, you started out with a typical knee-jerk defense of Vinod Khosla and the bio-energy industry writ large. If you would count to 10 and listen to what people here are saying, which is not (for he most part) to automatically condemn appropriate biomass technologies for developing countries, like biogas, or even some liquid biofuels where they make sense, you might find that we are not as far apart as you make us out to be.

None of us know for sure what technologies will win the race at the end of the day, nor do we know what the price of oil will be in 2012. (Some think it will fall.) Let's keep options open, agreed. But that is not the same as defending every last policy supporting anything remotely related to your chosen solution, Jonas.

These are only my personal opinions.

If the plugin bike, rickshaw or similar utilitarian vehicle, were used as a commercial vehicle an extra set of batteries could be charging while it was out making money for it's driver.

Or a biogas power plant could recharge it.  Or a wind or wave or river current generator.  This is perfect technology for developing economies.

Putting a motor and battery on a rickshaw is a job a local shop can do.  Were these conversion systems (solar panel, regulator, battery pack, drive motor) mass produced they would sell like hotcakes.

Put your money somewhere better, like this, Jonas.  Tell the micro-loan development bank org you support, that you want your donations to go toward making this a reality.  This is the way to leapfrog the poorest of the poor right past gas guzzling.

Solid oxide fuel cells are the biogas equivalent of solar panels.  They convert 50% of the biogas energy to electricity, and the waste heat can be used for cooking or water sterilization.  They are very cheap when mass produced too.  A few moving parts.  Far less complex than an internal combustion generator.

Wind power is very simple as well, as are wave and water current devices.  Perfect for local manufacture.

As with almost any technology though, like internal combustion cars, they have parts that need to be mass produced in high tech factories. So why not switch to better products to mass produce?  That produce far less GHG and lower energy prices.

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