|
Environmental
groups are calling on the Inter-American Development Bank
(IDB) to stop lending money to big companies rushing into
the booming ethanol business which some critics blame for
soaring food prices.
As riots over the cost of living broke out in impoverished
Haiti, the IDB prepared to announce increased funding of
ports, sugarcane mills and other biofuel ventures throughout
Latin America, citing plant-based fuels as a crucial counterweight
to climate change and rising energy prices.
“The
bank’s aggressive promotion of biofuels may be good
for corporations, but it’s a bad deal for farmers,
indigenous people and the environment in Latin America,”
Kate Horner of Friends of the Earth-US, said on Saturday
at the bank’s annual meeting in Miami.
World food prices have jumped due to what the United Nation’s
(UN) World Food Programme says is a mixture of high energy
prices, which are boosting transportation costs, increased
demand for food by developing countries, erratic weather
and competition between biofuels and food for land and investment.
The cost of food is threatening millions of people with
hunger and raising the risk of political instability.
Four people were killed when crowds ransacked and burned
stores in the southwestern Haitian town of Les Cayes on
Thursday night and looted food containers at a UN compound.
Friends of the Earth and other environmental groups say
a US law that aims to almost quintuple the amount of biofuel
used in the US by 2022 has led to a spike in production
and investment in the Americas.
Some grain production in the US has been diverted into ethanol
and the US is also importing large amounts of sugarcane
ethanol from the world’s biggest and most efficient
producer, Brazil, despite steep tariffs.
Gregory Manuel, an adviser to the US government on alternative
energy, said biofuels were a marginal contributor to rising
food prices.
“The
No 1 issue is the emerging market’s dietary shift towards
higher protein diets. That is the No 1 issue,” he said
at the IDB meeting.
High fertiliser and transportation costs and “a crash
in wheat stocks” due to a two-year drought in Australia
are also to blame, Manuel said.
Environmentalists, however, say there is a measurable impact
on food supply in places like Brazil.
Spurred by the possibility of a rich market for ethanol
in the US, investors—many of them foreign—have
been buying tracts of land in Brazil, pushing up prices
and driving away the small-scale family-based farms that
supply up to 60 per cent of the country’s food, said
Lucia Schild Ortiz of Friends of the Earth Brazil.
“There
was a time when the environmental movement took for granted
that anything that came from a plant was good. So (ethanol)
got lumped with renewables,” said Horner.
Not any more.
IDB President Luis Alberto Moreno said he believes Latin
America has a bright future in “green energy,”
or biofuels. The bank has around US$3 billion in private-sector
loan projects under consideration.
|
