The Big Biofuels Blog

The International Herald Tribune has an opinion piece about biofuels today by Eric Holt-Giménez executive director of the Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy. It is interesting because while it makes valid points about the proportion of income that the world's poor pay for food and their inability to absorb high price rises in staples.
It does not discuss the inefficiencies in food distribution that help to keep the price of food in those countries relatively high as a proportion of household income. Nor does it look at the amount of waste that could be used to produce biofuels.
That is not to say that the easy option of using crops that are grown together, are pretty homogeneous and marketed thorugh well established channels will not be more attractive than using the waste from the system.
But if we don't try to use that waste, which in the UK is about 30% of all the food sold (never mind the food that is harvested and doesn't make it to the store or goes bad in transit) then we ARE missing a trick and there will be more of the starving poor. Which can't be right. What do you think the proportion of food grown in the developing world that is harvested but does not make it to the plate. I'd love to know.