The Big Biofuels Blog

Sorta on topic, Southe Korean firm to grow corn (for food) and palm oil (food?, biodiesel?) in Madagascar:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7737643.stm

I'm not sure why this feels odd, but it does. It isn't imperialism exactly, and presumably the Madagascans feel that this is a fair deal. But It puts part of South Korea's food production some way from home, and vulnerable to pirates, blockades by hostile powers etc. in the future... On the upside I guess that it could put some money into the Malagasy economy and help develop the farming sector there... I'm sure that I've seen people promoting arguments that the US could swap agricultural land to non-food biofuel production and could import at least some of its food needs from South America, but I can't see that swapping dependence on fuel imports for dependence on food imports is a particularly good deal.

Hi Simon and readers,

I am a bit late responding to this post, been busy.

I was surprised that corn does figure so heavily in fast foods, but I will not question the premise.

I would like to point out that we still have massive capacity to increase corn production and meet world demand. As has been the case for nearly a century, the problem for American Agriculture is overproduction, not shortages. I have seen it pointed out many times that we can double corn production if and when we have the markets. South America also has a large underutilized corn and soy beans capacity.

Add in the fact that biomass energy processing is making for many new high protein food and feed additives to do something with, green algae cake is an example, and we still will have no problems feeding the world.

larry