Food versus fuel? Going beyond biofuels
By J. Tomei, R. Helliwell. 2016
218 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In less than a decade, biofuels transitioned from being a socially and politically acceptable alternative to conventional transport fuels to a deeply contested solution. Claims of land grabs, forest loss and food riots emerged to undermine the sustainability rationale that originally motivated their adoption. One of the early controversies to hit biofuels was that of food versus fuel. This framing drew attention not only to the competing uses of land i.e. for food or for fuel, but also to the impacts of consumption on marginalised people, particularly in the global South. While the debate has provided a useful hook on which to hang criticisms of increased demand for biofuels, it also masks a more complex reality. In particular, the multifaceted and global linkages between the stewardship of land, the food sector, and global energy policies. In this paper, we use the debate on food versus fuel as a lens to examine the interdependencies between the multiple end-uses of feedstocks and the multifunctionality of land. Revealing a more nuanced understanding of the realities of agricultural networks, land use conflicts and the values of the people managing land, we argue that the simplification achieved by food versus fuel, although effective in generating public resonance that has filtered into political response, has failed to capture much that is at the heart of the issue.
Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Pollution, Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6241f7ec9695052dbaabba123ab2a8fb4c7ead22
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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
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Citations in the corpus
- Bioeconomy Strategies: Contexts, Visions, Guiding Implementation Principles and Resulting Debates (2017, background): “However, due to the variety of applicable models [113], the number of driving forces and their open future change [114,115], the multifunctionality of land [116] and complex feedback mechanisms [117], forecast uncertainties in the context of future biomass potentials and potential land use conflicts”
- Long-Term Hydrocarbon Trade Options for the Maghreb Region and Europe—Renewable Energy Based Synthetic Fuels for a Net Zero Emissions World (2017, background): “Biofuel production is faced with resource limitations and conflicts with food production and, therefore, offers no substantial substitute [6,7].”
- Global Biofuels at the Crossroads: An Overview of Technical, Policy, and Investment Complexities in the Sustainability of Biofuel Development (2017, background): “Others point to the complicated mix of factors impacting land use, end-use, and markets for flexible crops [60].”