Submitted by 2point6billion.com Blog

Even as millions in developing countries in Asia and Africa are expected to die of starvation due to inflationary grain prices, president Bush asked Congress to authorize US$770 million to ease the global food crisis.

The United States is feeling the pressure of their empasis on biofuels even as energy and food demand rises. While grain supply is dwindling, experts around the world say that the American focus on biofuel subsidies which has given farmers incentives to grow biofuels in place of grain is only compounding the problem. As a result of the biofuels subsidies and a high demand for energy, farmers are more keen to plant acres of corn and sugarcane, the raw material for energy instead of rice and wheat human staples. This has led to the head on collosion of of a world food crisis partly fueled by record fuel costs.

Speaking on Monday at the European Parliament, Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at New York’s Columbia University and a special UN adviser said that while a third of the US maize crop will go to a gas tank, “it is a huge blow to the world food supply.” “We should cut back significantly on our biofuels programmes, which were understandable at a time of much lower food prices and much lower food stocks but do not make sense now at a time of global food scarcity condition,” he added, reported Reuters.

EU leaders last spring agreed that the EU should increase the use of biofuels in transport fuel to ten percent by 2020, up from a planned 5.75 percent target to be achieved by 2010.

The United States is the world’s biggest producer of biofuels. The fuels are made from crops like corn, wheat, sugar and palm oil, which refiners turn into ethanol or oil to replace gasoline and diesel. Supporters say they are the only renewable alternative to fossil fuels and generally result in lower greenhouse gas emissions.

While biofuels are not the only reason, politicians, economists and enviromentalists also say bigger factors are at work, namely increased demand for meat and dairy products, particularly in developing countres such as China and India whos disposable income is rising substantially and which has reduced farmland for growing food crops.

Mariann Fischer Boel, the EU’s commissioner for agriculture also noted that bad weather in 2006 in North America, Russia, the 27-nation EU and in Australia last year further led to less production, reported the International Herald Tribune.

Also — but harder to quantify — grain and other food commodity speculators have pushed up prices, she said. She said investments in commodity indexes that totaled US$10 billion in 1998 reached US$142 billion by 2007.

In February alone, 140 commodity-based financial products were launched for investors, according to EU data. That is double the number issued each month in 2006 and 2007.