If human beings were without sin, we would still live in an imperfect
world. Adam Smith's notion that by pursuing his own interest a man
"frequently promotes that of ... society more effectually than when he
really intends to promote it" and Karl Marx's picture of a society in which
"the free development of each is the condition for the free development
of all" are both mocked by one obvious constraint. The world is finite.
This means that when one group of people pursues its own interests, it
damages the interests of others.

It is hard to think of a better example than the current enthusiasm for
"biofuels". Biofuels are made from plant oils or crop wastes or wood,
and can be used to run cars and buses and lorries. Burning them simply
returns to the atmosphere the carbon which the plants extracted while
they were growing. So switching from fossil fuels to biodiesel and
bio-alcohol is now being promoted as the solution to climate change.

Next month the British government will have to set a target for the
amount of transport fuel that will come from crops. The European Union
wants 2% of the oil we use to be biodiesel by the end of next year, rising
to 6% by 2010 and 20% by 2020.(1) To try to meet these targets, the
government has reduced the tax on biofuels by 20 pence a litre, while the
EU is paying farmers an extra 45 euros a hectare to grow them.

Everyone seems happy about this. The farmers and the chemicals industry
can develop new markets, the government can meet its commitments to cut
carbon emissions, and environmentalists can celebrate the fact that
plant fuels reduce local pollution as well as global warming. Unlike
hydrogen fuel cells, biofuels can be deployed straight away. This in fact
was how Rudolf Diesel expected his invention to be used. When he
demonstrated his engine at the World Show in 1900, he ran it on peanut oil.

"The use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant
today," he predicted. "But such oils may become in course of time as
important as petroleum."(2) Some enthusiasts are predicting that if fossil
fuel prices continue to rise, he will soon be proved right.

I hope not. Those who have been promoting these fuels are
well-intentioned, but wrong. They are wrong because the world is finite. If biofuels
take off, they will cause a global humanitarian disaster.

Used as they are today, on a very small scale, they do no harm. A few
thousand greens in the United Kingdom are running their cars on used
chip fat. But recycled cooking oils could supply only 100,000 tonnes of
diesel a year in this country,(3) equivalent to one 380th of our road
transport fuel.

It might also be possible to turn crop wastes such as wheat stubble
into alcohol for use in cars - the Observer ran an article about this on
Sunday.(4) I'd like to see the figures, but I find it hard to believe
that we will be able to extract more energy than we use in transporting
and processing straw. But the EU's plans, like those of all the
enthusiasts for bio-locomotion, depend on growing crops specifically for fuel.
As soon as you examine the implications, you discover that the cure is
as bad as the disease.

Road transport in the United Kingdom consumes 37.6 million tonnes of
petroleum products a year.(5) The most productive oil crop which can be
grown in this country is rape. The average yield is between 3 and 3.5
tonnes per hectare.(6) One tonne of rapeseed produces 415 kilos of
biodiesel.(7) So every hectare of arable land could provide 1.45 tonnes of
transport fuel. To run our cars and buses and lorries on biodiesel, in
other words, would require 25.9m hectares. There are 5.7m in the United
Kingdom.(8) Switching to green fuels requires four and half times our
arable area. Even the EU's more modest target of 20% by 2020 would
consume almost all our cropland.

If the same thing is to happen all over Europe, the impact on global
food supply will be catastrophic: big enough to tip the global balance
from net surplus to net deficit. If, as some environmentalists demand, it
is to happen worldwide, then most of the arable surface of the planet
will be deployed to produce food for cars, not people.

This prospect sounds, at first, ridiculous. Surely if there was unmet
demand for food, the market would ensure that crops were used to feed
people rather than vehicles? There is no basis for this assumption. The
market responds to money, not need. People who own cars have more money
than people at risk of starvation. In a contest between their demand
for fuel and poor people's demand for food, the car-owners win every
time. Something very much like this is happening already.

Though 800 million people are permanently malnourished, the global
increase in crop production is being used to feed animals: the number of
livestock on earth has quintupled since 1950.(9) The reason is that those
who buy meat and dairy products have more purchasing power than those
who buy only subsistence crops.

Green fuel is not just a humanitarian disaster; it is also an
environmental disaster. Those who worry about the scale and intensity of today's
agriculture should consider what farming will look like when it is run
by the oil industry. Moreover, if we try to develop a market for
rapeseed biodiesel in Europe it will immediately develop into a market for
palm oil and soya oil.

Oilpalm can produce four times as much biodiesel per hectare as rape,
and it is grown in places where labour is cheap. Planting it is already
one of the world's major causes of tropical forest destruction. Soya
has a lower oil yield than rape, but the oil is a by-product of the
manufacture of animal feed. A new market for it will stimulate an industry
which has already destroyed most of Brazil's cerrado (one of the world's
most biodiverse environments) and much of its rainforest. It is
shocking to see how narrow the focus of some environmentalists can be. At a
meeting in Paris last month, a group of scientists and greens studying
abrupt climate change decided that Tony Blair's two big ideas - tackling
global warming and helping Africa - could both be met by turning Africa
into a biofuel production zone. This strategy, according to its
convenor, "provides a sustainable development path for the many African
countries that can produce biofuels cheaply".(10)

I know the definition of sustainable development has been changing, but
I wasn't aware that it now encompasses mass starvation and the
eradication of tropical forests. Last year the British parliamentary committee
on environment, food and rural affairs, which is supposed to specialise
in joined-up thinking, examined every possible consequence of biofuel
production - from rural incomes to skylark numbers - except the impact
on food supply.(11) We need a solution to the global warming caused by
cars, but this isn't it. If the production of biofuels is big enough to
affect climate change, it will be big enough to cause global
starvation. www.monbiot.com

1. The European Union, 8th May 2003. Directive 2003/30/EC: On the
Promotion of the Use of Biofuels or Other Renewable Fuels for Transport.
Official Journal L 123 , 17/05/2003 P. 0042 -- 0046.

2. Eg Monsanto, no date. The Biodiesel Revolution.
http://www.monsanto.co.uk/biofuels/071202.html

3. British Association for Biofuels and Oils, no date. Memorandum to
the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.
http://www.biodiesel.co.uk/press_release/royal_commission_on_environmenta.htm

4. Robin McKie, 21st November 2004. Forget the tiger. Put some
mushrooms in your tank . The Observer.

5. Department for Transport, 2004. Petroleum Consumption: by Transport
Mode and Fuel Type.
http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_transstats/documents/page/dft_transstats_031767.pdf

6. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Crops for Energy
Branch, 17th November 2004. Pers comm.

7. ibid.

8. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 2004.
Agriculture in the UK 2003.
http://statistics.defra.gov.uk/esg/publications/auk/2003/chapter3.pdf

9. Lester R. Brown, 1997. The Agricultural Link: How Environmental
Deterioration Could Disrupt Economic Progress. Worldwatch Paper 136. The
Worldwatch Institute, Washington DC.

10. Dr Peter Read, 20th October 2004. Good news on climate change.
Abrupt Climate Change Strategy Workshop. Press Release.
http://www.accstrategy.org/goodnews.html

11. House of Commons Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs,
29 October 2003. Seventeenth Report.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmselect/cmenvfru/929/92902.htm