Food or Fuel?

This week I read an article from the New York Times called “Rush to Use Crops as Fuel Raises Food Prices and Hunger Fears” (which you can read here) by Elisabeth Rosenthal. This article sheds light on the growing biofuel industry and the way it impacts available food crops. There is a rush to convert energy use to biofuel, and in order to produce this biofuel companies need raw materials like corn and sugar cane. Using these crops for fuel rather than food reduces the amount of food available.

The article gives the example of Thailand and the cassava that grows there. Thailand is a developing nation and its cassava supply is an important source of food for its citizens. Unfortunately, cassava is also an important source of biofuel. In 2009, however, 98% of the cassava that was exported from Thailand was sent to China to be made into biofuel, meaning that there was much less of it available to be sold as food to people who depend on it. This contributes to world hunger and increases issues people in these smaller nations already have with nutrition. Additionally, this shrinking food supply increases prices because there is less availability. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Index estimates that food prices rose 15% between October and January alone. This increase put food prices at their highest since the group started tracking them twenty years ago.

Overall, I found this article very interesting because I had not thought about how the increase of the use of biofuel would impact people in different ways. There must be decisions made about whether these crops should be used for food for people in developing nations or if they should be used for fuel. I think that this is an issue that will need to be studied much more before any decisions can be made, but I also feel that it is important for the people growing these crops to benefit from them rather than seeing them made into fuel that they will not be able to use.

This week I went for a walk in my neighborhood for about an hour. I have also been taking a yoga class at Salem, which I really enjoy, in order to fulfill my physical education requirement.