Quote:
Originally Posted by Flames in 07
And with the cost of the underlying commodity rising, even less will make it for transport.
Your right technically the planet may not be short food, but it is definately short economically feasable food. And this is a huge step back ... again because we buy big a$$ houses and now want to subsidize the cost of it.
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It probably makes more sense on a global scale for biofuels to be produced in developing nations as opposed to western nations, and the UN has a huge initiative out there to help developing nations get biofuel programs.
Let's take a hypothetical typical sub-saharan nation. They've got plenty of farmland (though they get hit by drought every few years), but not a lot of natural resources. Their farming methods are fairly traditional, with most crops still harvested by hand. Typical yield is around 1.5 tonnes of wheat per hectare. The government (with UN and western assistance) is educating farmers on western agriculture techniques, and there is a willingness to adopt better crop management cycles, though this these more labour-intensive farming techniques are difficult without machinery to streamline production. And the problem with machinery is fuel: oil prices in sub-saharan africa are typically around 10% above western prices, and the supply chain can be easily disrupted: if your neighbour gets into a civil war right around harvest time, you could be left with a bunch of useless machines. Enter biofuel: you build a biofuel plant, and convert a portion of your land to a high-yield biofuel crop such as rapeseed.
I'll use rapeseed as an example: combining small grains and seeds takes about .86 L of diesel per hectare. You`ve got 10 million hectares of wheat in your country (roughly equivelent to Alberta`s total grain land). It currently provides 15 million tonnes of wheat per non-drought year, and you need about 12.9 million litres of diesel to power your harvest if done by machine.
From each hectare of rapeseed, you would get 1,190 litres of biodiesel. So to produce enough biodiesel that your entire agriculture sector is no longer dependent on outside oil, you would need to convert just ten thousand hectares to produce enough biodiesel to power your entire harvest, combined with one small processing plant with a capacity only a fraction of the one planned near Edmonton. And once implemented, along with other sustainable agriculture techniques, your agriculture industry is self-sufficient and now produces 4.5 tonnes of wheat per hectare, for a total of 45 million tonnes rather than 15 million. As well, the additional source of fuel makes distribution of food less expensive. Biofuels are only a small part of the big picture: it needs to go hand-in-hand with a complete sustainable agriculture system.