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Nestle blames biofuels for high food prices
BBC ^ | July 18, 2012 | James Melik

Posted on 07/18/2012 2:03:37 PM PDT by CutePuppy

The head of the world's largest food producer believes high prices are due to the growing of crops for biofuels.

"The time of cheap food prices is over," says Nestle chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe.

He is highly critical of the rise in the production of bio-diesel, saying this puts pressure on food supplies by using land and water that would otherwise be used to grow crops for human or animal consumption.

"If no food was used for fuel, the prices would come down again - that is very clear," he says.

"We are now in a new world with a completely different level of food prices because of the direct link with fuel," he says.

He says biofuels are only affordable because of the high subsidies they receive, particularly in the US.

"It is absolutely unacceptable and cannot be justified," he says.

"There is one demand that I have, and that is not to use food for fuel."

Water crisis

Mr Brabeck-Letmathe says politicians have not understood that the food market and the oil market are the same - they are both calorific markets.

"The only difference is that with the food market you need 2,500 calories per person per day, whereas in the energy market you need 50,000 calories per person," he says.

When politicians said they wanted to replace 20% of fossil fuels with biofuels, it meant increasing the production of crops threefold, according to Mr Brabeck-Letmathe.

< snip > .....

Agriculture uses 70% of world's water consumption and the public must be made aware of the inefficient usage of this precious resource, Mr Brabeck-Letmathe adds.

"It takes about 4,600 litres of water to produce one litre of pure ethane oil if it comes from sugar, and it takes 1,900 litres of water if it comes from palm oil," he says.

.....

(Excerpt) Read more at m.bbc.co.uk ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; Front Page News; Government; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: africa; biofuels; energy; environmentalism; food; foodprices; footprint; horizontalspace; inefficient; naturalresources; nestle; palmoil; prices; resources; sugar; sustainability; unsustainable; water
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To: Spktyr; Sioux-san
Yes - we can and should be (if we're going to mandate alcohol in fuel) making alcohol from stuff like switchgrass and other such weeds that don't replace food ...

Actually, the bigger issue is the confusion that the problems are due to ethanol being made from foodstuff (such as corn) where the real problem is that most biofuels require huge swaths of horizontal space/land and water resources which are then not available to planting "real" marketable cropa due to subsidized ethanol/biofuels/"renewables" mandates.

As the Nestlé's chairman explained that's the real source of the problem, not any particular "weed" that has potentially higher calorific content (it amounts to a miniscule fraction of true resource hogging for biofuels production).

Hence, that's why there is some interest in water-based algae-to-oil production, but that has been also not very successful so far, and the bigger problem is it's just not as scalable (for similar reasons - horizontal space requirements) as vertical oil/gas production methods (drilling) or the nuclear power which requires little space and generates very little waste - i.e., the "waste" product itself is reconsumable in the later generation nuclear plants, such as thorium or other fast breeder reactors.

61 posted on 07/19/2012 3:33:04 PM PDT by CutePuppy (If you don't ask the right questions you may not get the right answers)
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To: CutePuppy

Hence my comment about using viable alternatives not taking up food-crop growing space.

There are plants we could make biofuels out of that would actually grow poorly on normally arable land, that actually want to grow in a swamp. That is the sort of thing that would be a better idea, as I was trying to convey. You weren’t going to be growing anything else in that swamp, so why not use it to grow something that would actually be useful?


62 posted on 07/19/2012 3:45:30 PM PDT by Spktyr (Overwhelmingly superior firepower and the willingness to use it is the only proven peace solution.)
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To: Spktyr

10 years - 172,000 miles - I am happy not to have a car payment


63 posted on 07/19/2012 6:10:18 PM PDT by Sioux-san
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