Leader: Against the grain

In Britain, surging grocery prices are painful, but not life-threatening. For much of the rest of the world, by contrast, food prices are a matter of life or death. China, the world’s largest wheat producer, is suffering a severe winter drought which looks likely to devastate this year’s harvest. It is setting aside a billion dollars to snap up supplies in the market, with the inevitable result that other, poorer countries will lose out. When global food costs surge, starvation usually follows.

At times like this, it is harder than ever to justify why we in the West are encouraging farmers to grow crops to fill car petrol tanks, rather than people’s stomachs. The biofuels fad is one of many expensive and woefully ineffective ways of replacing our dependence on fossil fuels. In the United States, a quarter of all grain harvested is sent to ethanol distilleries to produce fuel for cars — enough to feed 350 million people for a year. The British government has its orders from the European Union: biofuel must constitute 10 per cent of this country’s transport fuel by the end of this decade.

One of the greatest mistakes in politics is to judge a policy by its intentions rather than by its results (intended and unintended). The charity ActionAid estimates that 30 per cent of the last global fuel price hike was caused by the setting aside of farmland for biofuels. It is likely to be at least as much this time around. And for what? Converting land for inefficient crops is itself a carbon-intensive process. Factor in that, and the amount of carbon saved from switching to biofuels becomes embarrassingly small.