On this episode of the Fueling the Future podcast, I spoke with Dr. Dev Shrestha of the University of Idaho about the recent paper he co-authored, “Biofuel Impact on Food Prices Index and Land Use Change.” The paper found, among other things that short term food price increases have been blamed on biofuel based on simplistic analyses, which may not reveal the main drivers of food insecurity and ignore opportunities for bioenergy to contribute to solutions. Looking at real-world data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the study team was able to show that there is no impact on food prices or land use change happening because of biofuels production and consumption.  Following are a few excerpts from our discussion, which you can download or listen to at the link below or listen to in ITunes.

On the Question of Whether There Really Is Land Use Change Associated with Biofuels:

“This is one of the questions we generally get about biofuel, that if we grow or use agriculture product to make biofuel, then the same amount of agriculture product that uses in making biofuels fuel has to be grown somewhere else, that means somewhere else has to convert agricultural land or forest land into agriculture. That’s called indirect land use change. That means because of the fact that we use more biofuel in United States, some other country has to clear up forests to grow agriculture product that they’re missing from the United States. Again, this is all the model predictions. It makes sense from outside. The idea is that the biofuel creates more demand for agriculture product and the forest has to be converted to agricultural land. That’s a valid concern.

 

However, what we have found looking at the real world data is the opposite of this expectation. The world and U.S. agricultural land is steadily decreasing, not increasing. I would emphasize that fact that the world and the U.S. agricultural land is steadily decreasing. The reason that the world needs less land to grow food may be explained by improving land productivity. So despite declining agricultural land, the World Bank data shows we are growing agriculture production by 2.8%. And that’s been consistent since 2000. Declining agricultural land in case of the U.S. and the world average is true. However, we have not looked into individual countries. There may be some countries that deviate from the world average. So that’d be an interesting study in itself to look at, as you said, there may be a country or two which deviates from the average of the world’s land productivity or land use change impact we have seen in this study.”

On the Problem with Relying on Economic Models for Assessing Potential Land Use Change from Biofuels:

“Despite economic models having many known flaws, we rely on economic models because this is the best tool that’s available out there. And economic models have worked for many other problems, but since this is relatively new without much data, it hasn’t worked in addressing indirect land use issues for biofuels. So initial studies to predict land use change, again, have used these existing economic models. They were not designed to predict the impact of biofuels, that’s the reason that predictions were either off or even in some cases completely the opposite of what actually happened.

 

So I’ll give you these four predictions that was given in 2008 paper [the Searchinger study] using this economic model, and then we’ll compare how that economic m...