ST. LOUIS ”“ The race to bioenergy is coming to a giant speedbump. As food replaces fossil fuels at the pump, there aren”™t enough crops for both dinner and driving.
“Even if the world”™s entire vegetable oil crop was turned to fuel, it would only serve the Unites States”™ energy needs for 29 days,” said Carl Hausmann, president and chief executive officer of Bunge North America Inc., while speaking at the 2007 World Agricultural Congress.
Bunge North America is an American supplier of agricultural commodities and food products to the global marketplace. It is the North American operating arm of Bunge Ltd, which is located in White Plains.
As more crops are used for biofuels, it would mean less of them would be used for food. So an increased crop production would be needed to replace the crops used for energy.
There are no easy solutions to deal with these problems, Hausmann said, but political, agricultural and nongovernment organization leaders must begin addressing them in earnest.
One answer, he said, is identifying and investing in a wider variety of biofuel sources than currently exist.
For example, Brazil has been studying the use of sugar cane as an alternative form of energy. Other projects are championing algae, even hemp.
Hausmann said that Brazil has more untapped cropping surface in its country than the U.S. currently has in production. So there are opportunities to find more sources of bioenergy, he said.
One problem, he said, is that farmers in some countries who could be producing alternative biofuels don”™t have the financial means to do so.
To that end, Dr. Marcos Jonk, president of the Brazilian Institute for International Trade Negotiations, said the United States and the European Union need to invest money in biofuels other than what those countries produce, such as corn and grain used for ethanol.
To make his point, Jonk cited the Bush administration”™s goal of increasing the U.S. production of ethanol to 35 billion gallons annually by 2017. He said the U.S. would need to use 146 percent of the current corn crop area to meet that demand, which makes the need to invest in other forms of biofuel important, he argued. The U.S. currently produces about 4.9 billion gallons of ethanol per year.
“The U.S. and Europe should consider other biofuels,” he said, such as the sugarcane Brazil produces.
Jonk claimed that sugar cane could produce a biofuel that has twice the productivity and half the cost of corn.
Jonk said as more different countries begin producing their own forms of biofuel, “supply and demand will shift from developed countries to the emerging countries.”
Â
Â
