Biofuels and land use

Current transport biofuels are mainly made from crops producing starch, sugar and edible oils. In doing so, they divert those crops from providing food. However, the demand for food is highly inelastic. I have never met anyone in an industrialized country who changed his diet because of transport biofuel production. So, additional crops have to be grown compensating for the diversion of starch, sugar and oil to biofuel production.

Part of this additional production takes place on existing agricultural soils by increasing productivity. This is not always the case. In a recent paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, it is for instance shown that worldwide the 1970-2005 expansion of two major suppliers of biofuels, sugarcane and soybeans, was characterized by decreasing productivity (1). More importantly however, when the expansion of transport biofuel production is fast, as it currently is, also land that is not under cultivation has to be used for food production.

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