Filling up at the pump with “green” fuel is increasingly becoming a bad idea. Crop-based fuels, long touted as a way to decarbonize the transportation sector, have a host of now well-documented impacts on food security, the environment, and human rights. First, by diverting crops from food use, then by converting land that previously served as carbon sinks, and finally by increasing the risk of land grabs in developing countries.
In a report published on Wednesday 11 September, the NGO Oxfam calls on the European Union (EU) to end policies supporting agrofuels, and asks member states to take measures to abandon the use of agrofuels from agricultural crops.
In 2021, European countries used 26 million tonnes of food and feed crops as biofuel, representing the production of 5.3 million hectares of agricultural land. Globally, demand is growing: 15% of vegetable oils produced worldwide are now used for fuel. According to Oxfam estimates, global biofuel production, if used directly for human consumption, could have met the minimum caloric needs of 1.6 billion people.
A rather rhetorical estimate since most of the crops used to run engines (soya, sunflower, etc.) are primarily used to feed animals, but which signals the scale of the volumes involved while the biofuel industry denies competing with food needs. While more than 733 million people suffer from hunger – more than 9% of the world’s population – and 2.3 billion are in a situation of food insecurity, the impact of biofuels must be taken into greater account, the NGO believes.
Price volatility
For this report, Oxfam drew on the work of statistician Chris Malins, who has studied the impact of biofuel demand on global food prices and price volatility. The association cites in particular the example of the doubling of the price of vegetable oil between the end of 2020 and 2021, partly linked to the growth in demand for hydrotreated vegetable oils, a synthetic biodiesel. Well before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which destabilized the markets in 2022, food commodity prices followed the same curve as energy prices.
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