The United Nations warns us that between 750 and 800 million people in the world are undernourished. On the other hand, Dennis Meadows, one of the authors of the famous Report to the Club of Rome "The Limits to Growth" already speaks of the fact that we may be reaching the maximum production of food worldwide in these years, especially grains, which sustain billions of people on the planet. The myth that the Earth can feed many more people than it does today is crumbling because there are serious problems of aquifer depletion, annual loss of thousands of hectares of crops due to advancing desertification, deforestation, urbanization and salinization, and climate changes that are already causing extensive inter- and transcontinental migrations due to overexploitation.
Feeding 6.5 billion inhabitants sufficiently is one of the great objectives of the millennium, and should be at the political and moral apex of our civilization. Today, the food supply of a good part of the planet's inhabitants is based on an agro-industrial system that originated in the so-called "green revolution", which meant a real take-off in productivity per hectare of cultivated land. According to some experts, we are reaching the exhaustion of this model, because it is based on the permanent and increasing injection
of fertilizers -based on the petrochemical industry- and pesticides to obtain the aforementioned yields. Of course, the pressure on the "E(e)arth", as Jorge Riechmann would say, is achieving the growing reduction of these: more and more energy inputs to
maintain production, before it decreases. To the unsustainable "agricultural chemical soup" over time, we must add the existence of millions of tractors, trillions of meters of plastic irrigation, an immensity of refrigeration systems, transport, etc. today powered by oil and gas; the former, in sharp decline soon. And the energy decline is equivalent today, due to extreme dependence, to a decline in food. Therefore, increasingly expensive food: those who cannot afford it will go hungry, as is already the case today. And we, in the face of the energy - food decline, are not excluded from that fate in the future.
For years now, world grain production per person has decreased. China, for eight years, has had to import increasing amounts of food for its population. China's agricultural land for soybeans is today among the most polluted in the world due to the incredible
amount of fertilizers used to maintain production.
In this scenario, biofuels are one of the most perverse and immoral "solutions" to the energy decline. Lester Brown, the director of the Earth Policy Institute, and author of the so-called "Plan B 2.0", warns today that "supermarkets compete with cars" in the
food production. It is not even necessary to enter into the extreme dependence of this "solution" on the industrial system based on oil, nor in the very low, if not negative, rate of energy return of this resource, or in the ravages that it already causes today in natural ecosystems felled to extend energy crops.
Supposed "green alternatives" to oil are proliferating in the world. This is one of the most sinister. Today it is necessary to choose. Filling our vehicles with biodiesel is equivalent to competing with the poor people of the world in the international grain markets, such as the Chicago market, which are witnessing the permanent rise in prices of basic foods for humanity. It means snatching the possibility of feeding the world to feed our insatiable mobile fleet, a horrible paradox where they exist. It is shocking to think about
how today batches of crops are already being negotiated that farmers sell to the highest bidder, the fuel distributors for the vehicles of the first world. The ships with those crops deviate from their natural routes to end up in factories in the first world that
devour, processing as "green" fuel, what the world needs to feed people. Please, if we want to avoid more hunger in the world, let's give up biofuels.
Juan Jesús Bermúdez Ferrer,
President of the Association "Canarias ante la crisis energética"
