I wonder if said scientists are in the back pocket of big oil. Article here. Original report here.

Scientists call for halt in grain-based biofuel production

By Hwee Hwee Tan
Filed from Singapore 4/30/2008 4:54:31 AM GMT

INTERNATIONAL:  Some scientists are calling for a moratorium on using grain-based feedstock to produce biofuel to halt the rise in global food prices.  Joachim von Braun, head of the International Food Policy Research Institute, told local journalists after a teleconference that if a biofuel moratorium is issued this year, it would lead to a price decline in corn by about 20 percent and wheat by about 10 percent from 2009 to 2010.

In his published paper, Rising Food Prices: What Should be Done?, von Braun blames the rising food prices on a combination of factors, including high oil prices, growing population, change in world population dietary habits and unfavourable climate change.  A copy of the paper can be found on the International Food Policy Research Institute Web site, here.

Developed nations like the U.S. have shifted their cultivation toward biofuel feedstocks, expecially maize, at the expense of food crop farming.  About 30 per cent of U.S. maize production will go into ethanol in 2008 rather than into world food and feed markets, von Braun said in the paper.

World nations have to make a hard choice between fighting high fuel prices and fighting world hunger.  If food security is more important than national energy security, world leaders should halt biofuel production in the meantime, he said.

While calling on a biofuel moratorium, von Braun also made the distinction between "good" and "bad" biofuels.  Waste-based and sugar cane-based biofuels can be very good, he said.

He said the biofuel subsidies in the U.S. and Europe are an implicit tax on staple foods that has served to distort world food prices.  He called on developed nations to eliminate biofuel subsidies and open their markets to sugar cane-based biofuel exporting countries like Brazil in the long-run.

Rattan Lal, an Ohio State University soil sciences professor, supported von Braun's call for grain-based biofuel moratorium.  "We need to feed the stomach before we need to feed our cars," Lal said in an interview with the Associated Press.  "We have one billion people who are food insecure.  We can't afford the luxury of not taking care of them and taking care of gasoline."