Food security and global security - IEEE

José María Medina ReyBiofuels and food securityINTERNATIONALSITUATION• Adverse weather• Bad crops• Oil price increaseSUPPLY• Climate Change• Desertification• Aquifer drying up• Yield stagnation• Land grabbing• Abandonment of agricultural land• Less invesment in agricultural• Distortion in global food markets• Stagnation of the agricultural lands• Financial speculation• Dollar depreciation andimpact on cereal marketsDEMAND• Population growth• Change in eating patterns inemerging countries• Deregulation of markets infood raw materials• Food losses• Biofuels boom216STRUCTURALFigure 5: Source: Especulación financiera y crisis alimentaria. Campaña «Derecho a laalimentación. Urgente», 2011, p. 20.Many of the causes act in synergy. Population growth involves, amongst otherthings, a growing demand for energy, especially oil, which, together with otherfactors, is pushing up the price of crude. Higher oil prices lead to some farmingproduce being more expensive -some of these costs are directly or indirectlyrelated to oil- and promotes cultivation of biofuels, with the increased demandfor these also contributing to price rises in raw materials for food used to makethem. When the raw materials for food become more expensive, it attractsspeculative capital investment which floods the markets for agriculturalproducts and gives impetus to volatile prices, which is the prime conditionfor making profits. When prices of raw materials for food become volatile,a very few entities -large investors, large cereal companies, multinationals inthe agroindustry- reap huge profits, whilst hundreds of millions of vulnerablepeople cannot buy the basic foodstuffs needed to survive. A good example isthe fact that some of these large companies tripled or quadrupled their profitsbetween 2006 and 2008, with the food crisis in full swing (33) .Owing to these inter-related causes, it is difficult to measure how far biofuelshave been responsible for generating the food crisis. In fact, there are severalpoints of view, from those who say it plays very little part, to those whoattribute most of the responsibility to biofuel. On this subject, in 2008, there(33)Alianza Biodiversidad. Crisis climática: falsos remedios y soluciones verdaderas. 2010,p.27.