Filling up with “green” fuel at the pump is increasingly a bad idea. Fuels from agricultural crops, long presented as a path to decarbonising the transport sector, cause a multitude 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 a carbon sink and, finally, by increasing the risk of land grabbing in developing countries.
In a report published on Wednesday 11 September, the NGO Oxfam calls on the European Union (EU) to end policies that support agrofuels and calls on 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 agrofuel, representing the production of 5.3 million hectares of agricultural land. Globally, demand is growing: 15% of vegetable oils produced worldwide are currently used for fuel. According to Oxfam estimates, global agrofuel 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 power engines (soybeans, sunflowers, etc.) are mainly used as animal feed, but it indicates the magnitude of the volumes involved, while the biofuel industry avoids competing with food needs. While 730 million people suffer from hunger (more than 9% of the world’s population) and 2.3 billion suffer from food insecurity, the impact of agrofuels must be taken into account more, estimate NGOs.
Price volatility
For this report, Oxfam drew on the work of statistician Chris Malins, who 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 due to the growth in demand for hydrotreated vegetable oils (HVO), a synthetic biodiesel. Long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which destabilised markets in 2022, food commodity prices followed the same curve as energy prices.
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