The next Bonn Dialogues discusses the issue of "Energy & Food Security - Much Ado About Nothing?" The public symposium takes place on Tuesday, 10 November 2009, at 6:00 pm at Deutsche Welle in Bonn.

The energy and food issue are interconnected and constitute two of the biggest challenges in the near future. The production of biofuels has increased considerably. Large areas of rain forests are being cleared for soybean and oil palm cultivation to produce biofuels which are needed for energy production.

Two main implications of this trend are: The production of biofuels negatively impacts already vulnerable ecosystems causing conflicts over land and climate change, and second, it contributes to the rising of food prices, increasing the number of poor people going hungry.

A panel of international experts will look at the different effects and connections. They will debate how the consumers´ and producers´ interests can be combined and what the long-term effects of biofuel production could be for vulnerable communities and the environment. 

Please find the detailed Concept Note for the event under "Read more" below.

 

Human beings need a daily energy input in form of foodstuff. On the other hand, humanity depends on far greater additional energy input, which is largely based on petrol, natural gas and coal. Both the food and the energy issue are two of our biggest challenges in the near future:

One of the Millennium Development Goals is to halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger. And one of the goals to be negotiated at the Climate Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009 is to reduce drastically our dependence on fossil fuels in order to limit greenhouse gas emissions in the face of climate change.

Many alternative energy sources are increasingly being considered to replace fossil fuels at least partially. Bioenergy (1) is one of them, and specifically biofuels (2) have been controversially discussed in both scientific and political circles.

In 2006, around 10% of the global primary energy supply was biomass, most of it being traditional noncommercial biomass (e.g. firewood). Less than 2% come from commercial bioenergy used to generate heat and electricity and to produce liquid biofuels for transport.

Biomass energy is chemical energy stored in plants after transformation of solar energy through photosynthesis. A number of conversion technologies transform this into useful energy products. For example, ethanol is produced from crops such as maize or sugarcane, and biodiesel is derived from vegetable oils.

New technologies are being developed in order to utilize in particular the non-food parts of plants – these biofuels are known as second or third generation biofuels. At the Bonn Dialogues, we will be concentrating on the first generation: energy generated from cultivated plant biomass within an agricultural system.

It was the oil crisis in the 1970s that was the trigger for Brazil to invest massively in bioethanol. In addition to the case of Brazil, other countries such as India (Agoramoorthy et al.: 2009) or the EU (European Comission: 2007) are now legislating for biofuels representing a bigger portion of the total transport-related fuel.

Consequently, the production of biofuels has considerably increased during the last couple of years. This trend may have two-fold implications. First, it causes land use conflicts and second, it leads to an increase of commodity prices. Some of the tradeoffs concerning biofuels and their impacts are:

    * Land use change could rather increase CO2 emissions instead of decreasing them, a debt that could only be repaid after several decades or centuries.

    * Land use changes have the potential to negatively impact biodiversity, particularly in the most fragile ecosystems.

    * Agricultural expansion and industrial processes for biofuel production will increase pressures on already stressed water resources.

    * Agricultural expansion for biofuel production can increase the vulnerability of (local/regional) communities.

    * Production of biofuels can contribute to increasing food prices, negatively affecting the poorest who spend more than half of their income on food.

    * Production of biofuels and increasing food prices have the potential to positively contribute to agricultural value and rural development.

Due to biofuel production, the Brazilian Cerrado for example is heavily threatened by soybean plantations, in Malaysia, large areas of rainforest are cleared for oil palm cultivation. This change of land use not only has a strong impact on unique ecosystems and threatens biodiversity, but also causes deforestation and creates huge carbon emissions.

From a climate change perspective the biofuel production is also unsustainable (Koh and Ghazoul: 2008). In addition, producing biomass energy via agricultural activities requires energy for cultivation, transport and manufacturing which often originates from fossil fuels and thus also contributes to climate change.

A larger biomass energy production worldwide will require improved industrial processes but also an increase in the surface area of land dedicated to the production of these fuel crops. Estimates (Field et al.: 2007) show that land area used for fuel biomass could occupy as much land area in 2050 as the area of land used for agriculture today, leading to further deforestation or land conversion in an attempt to increase food and/or biofuels production.

This agricultural expansion not only affects ecosystems and water resources, but also might increase the vulnerability of communities, for example when people are displaced from their habitats or being victims of land grabbing. (3)

Furthermore, the rise of biofuel production has been put forward as one of the reasons for last year’s food price increases. In 2007, 23% of coarse grain production in the US, 54% of Brazil’s sugar-cane crop, and 47% of vegetable oil production in the EU was used for biofuels (FAO: 2008). The linkages between fuel and food are complex and vary across countries, both on the economical and the political level. There are two perspectives regarding the increase of food prices: the producers’ point of view and the  consumers’ point of view.

This corresponds to the trade off between the increase of farmers’ income versus the increase of hunger in the world. Here, certainly both, the speed of price rise as well as the effectiveness of social protection against hunger, are important.

However, concerning the food crisis of 2008, the contribution of biofuels is controversial. Also the role of financial speculations in the commodity sector has to be clarified, as well as the influence of the crude oil price and long neglected investments into agricultural development.

The 6th Bonn Dialogue will provide both state-of-the-art analysis by and controversial debates among its panellists concerning the energy-food nexus.

The following questions will be addressed by the panel:

   1. To what extent can biofuels contribute to a greener future?
   2. What could be the maximum contribution of biofuels to global energy supply, particularly with respect to other renewable energy sources?
   3. Is there a real risk that bioenergy and/or biofuel production will pose a long-term risk with respect to food security and the vulnerability of affected communities?
   4. Will vast areas of land be converted to biocrops or will governments wait for second and third generation technologies to convert other feedstock into bioenergy?
   5. Can biocrops contribute to the rehabilitation of marginal lands? At which social cost, if any?
   6. Do we need to impose sustainability standards for biofuel production, and how would they look like?
   7. Can bioenergy be efficient in terms of decentralised energy supply?

 

Footnotes

1 Bioenergy is the energy use of materials derived from biological sources, like firewood, animal dung or

modern biofuels.

2 “Biofuels are renewable fuels derived from biological feedstocks including both liquid forms (…) or

biodiesel (…), and gaseous forms such as biogas (…) or hydrogen.” (Koh and Ghazoul 2008: 2451).

3 A session on land-use conflicts was organized by ESSP, IHDP and the German Global Change Committee (NKGCF) at the 1st World Social Science Forum, Bergen, Norway, May 2009. See also Klepper et al. (2008).


References

Agoramoorthy, G.; Hsu, M.J.; Chaudhary, S.; Shieh, P.-C. (2009): Can biofuel crops alleviate tribal poverty in India’s drylands? In: Applied Energy. doi:10.1016/j.apenergy.2009.04.008.

European Commission (2007): Report on the progress made in the use of biofuels and other renewable fuels in the Member States of the European Union. COM, 2006, 845 final, Brussels.

FAO (2008): Bioenergy, food security and sustainability- towards an international framework. ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/meeting/013/k2498e.pdf, 12 August 2009.

Field, C.B.; Campbell, J.E.; Lobell, D.B. (2007): Biomass energy: the scale of the potential resource. In: Trends in Ecology and Evolution. Vol. 23. no. 2, pp. 65-72.

International Energy Agency (2008): Key World Energy Statistics. <http://www.iea.org/textbase/nppdf/free/2008/key_stats_2008.pdf>, 12 August 2009.

Klepper G.; Canadell, J. G.; Leemans, R.; Ometto, J. P.; Patwardhan, A.; Rice, M. (2008): ESSP Resarch on Bioenergy and Earth Sustainability: Tapping GEC Programme-Wide Expertise for the Benefit of Science and Society. IHDP Update Science-Policy Dialogues, Special Edition – 2008, ISSN 1727-155X.

Koh, L.P.; Ghazoul, J. (2008): Biofuels, biodiversity, and people: Understanding the conflicts and finding opportunities. In: Biological Conservation. Vol. 141, pp. 2450- 2460.