No conflict between crops for food and biofuels, says NFU

Posted 12 March 09

Speaking at an agricultural conference in London, Jonathan Scurlock, chief adviser on the environment and renewable energy to the National Farmers’ Union of England and Wales (NFU), said that the ‘food vs. fuel’ debate in the media is misleading.

“There is no conflict between food and fuel production – there has never been,” Scurlock told the Agra Europe Outlook 2009 conference on the future of agriculture.
“They are simply alternative uses of a resource. Agriculture needs to see this as an opportunity rather than a threat.”

With the global population predicted to reach 9 bln by 2050, food production needs to double – but Scurlock said biofuels production will not stand in the way of that goal by using up land needed to grow food crops.

“We’ve doubled world food production before, and we can do it again,” he claimed. “The world is not short of land, it is short of agricultural investment. There are many problems with the development of agriculture in developing countries.”

Challenges faced by developing world farmers included a lack of access to micro finance schemes, input costs, infrastructure to take products to market, and lack of information on market prices due to the unavailability of technology such as mobile phones and computers, Scurlock said.

Agricultural land can also be used for a number of purposes, Scurlock explained; for example producing food and fuel crops in rotation.

Factors driving the need for biofuels included climate change – which is set to cause extreme weather events, Scurlock said, and soaring oil prices.

We need to move from a culture of ‘embedded fossil carbon’ towards a sustainable resource-based economy, Scurlock emphasised.

Renewable energy technologies available to farmers now include anaerobic digestion, wind and solar power, and on-farm biodiesel manufacture.

An anaerobic digestion plant typically costs around GBP750,000, Scurlock said – and he believed farmers would be willing to make the investment as it was possible to begin to make a profit within five or six years.

From FO Licht’s World Ethanol & Biofuels Report

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