Biofuels & Population

I had one of those moments yesterday where I just freaked out. I am re-reading Daniel Quinn's book Ishmael and it gives a lot of ink to the relationship between population and food production.

In the last few weeks I've read several articles on the impact of biofuels, and by a great stroke of fortune, I actually even met a cattle rancher a few weeks ago who verified what I had read.

Okay, here is the scoop: Among other things, biofuels are going to soak up world surpluses of grain. Farmers in the U.S. really don't care about world famine — they simply sell their crops at the highest price possible, and if a biofuel distillery offers them more money than some foreign entity, then so be it.

So, what freaked me out is that author Daniel Quinn was already talking about the food-population relationship in his 1992 novel. His writings seem to suggest that population is related to food production. In other words, we humans will just keep breeding to the limit of our food supply, just like any other species. We are NOT above the laws of nature, even though we think we are — this is a key point in Quinn's books.

What this means is as the biofuel industry grows, food will become more expensive for everyone but it's going to especially impact the Third World poor. In the long-term, it would be a good for our Planet, but starvation is a miserable thing and I don't wish it on anyone.

The bottom line is that I wish all people had the common sense and maturity to self-regulate their reproduction. For the U.S. and other countries, it will come down to either achieving more energy security or feeding the Third World's skyrocketing population. It will be interesting, and probably unpleasant, to watch this scenario play out.

From an article by Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute:

The competition for grain between the world's 800 million motorists who want to maintain their mobility and its 2 billion poorest people who are simply trying to survive is emerging as an epic issue. Soaring food prices could lead to urban food riots in scores of lower-income countries that rely on grain imports, such as Indonesia, Egypt, Algeria, Nigeria, and Mexico. The resulting political instability could in turn disrupt global economic progress, directly affecting all countries. It is not only food prices that are at stake, but trends in the Nikkei Index and the Dow Jones 500 as well.