Fuelling the biofuels debate

There’s nothing quite as smug as an op-ed columnist, who claims the high ground, and currently The New York Times’s Paul Krugman is unbelievably smug. In a column, Grains Gone Wild (read the full piece) published on 7th April Krugman opens up with the platitude; “These days you hear a lot about the world financial crisis. But there’s another world crisis under way — and it’s hurting a lot more people.”

He is, of course, referring to a real and chronic shortage of staple food stuffs around the world. While I may not like his writing style, he is absolutely right. He is also bang on the nose when he suggests that there are a variety of reasons for the problem; “How did this happen? The answer is a combination of long-term trends, bad luck — and bad policy.”

He goes on to list some of the reasons; growing demand for meat in Asia, the price of oil, and the recent run of bad harvests. Again bang on. But then he warms to his central theme and tackles policy, and here it all starts to go very wrong for Krugman.

“The rise of China and other emerging economies is the main force driving oil prices, but the invasion of Iraq — which proponents promised would lead to cheap oil — has also reduced oil supplies below what they would have been otherwise”, he asserts. Great argument but factually wrong. According to the International Energy Agency and reported by the BBC last December “Iraqi oil exceeds pre war output“, Iraq was producing 2.3 million barrels per day, a figure “above the levels seen before the US-led invasion of the country in 2003″.

The bad weather and harvests he says are “probably” caused by global warming. Arguable, I don’t necessarily disagree but it could have been just a bad harvest, they have happened before. So perhaps on the policy level, his accusation that governments who have done nothing about greenhouse gases should shoulder some of the blame, is OK.

Having quite clearly argued that there are a variety of reasons as to why the crisis is with us, he then takes a huge leap and essentially blames the whole problem on biofuels. “Where the effects of bad policy are clearest, however, is in the rise of demon ethanol and other biofuels.”

Although deforestation has been going on for decades, often for food production and logging, Krugman nevertheless seems to suggests that Brazil’s ethanol policy is solely to blame for the acceleration of climate change by promoting deforestation.

He continues; “And meanwhile, land used to grow biofuel feedstock is land not available to grow food, so subsidies to biofuels are a major factor in the food crisis.” While the first part of the statement is undeniably true, the second part is a complete non-sequitur. As it stands the first statement has no relationship to the second whatsoever.

Finally he gives up all reasoned argument and goes for the trusted tool of the op-ed writer, emotion. “You might put it this way: people are starving in Africa so that American politicians can court votes in farm states.”

What really annoys me is the core of his argument is right and something really does need to be done about the food shortages. Krugman also gets it right in four paragraphs close to the end of his piece where he says that; “one reason the food crisis has gotten so severe, so fast, is that major players in the grain market grew complacent.” Absolutely right!

The world has wandered into this with its eyes wide open, but never believed it could happen. It could and it did. It was a frightening mix of idleness, stupidity and complacency. Biofuels is inevitably part of that mix. But let’s be quite clear Mr Krugman the problem we face today isn’t because of biofuels.

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