Impact On Developing Countries
Demand for fuel in rich countries is now competing against demand for food in poor countries. The increase in world grain consumption in 2006 happened due to the increase in consumption for fuel, not human consumption. The grain required to fill a 25 US gallons (95 L) fuel tank with ethanol will feed one person for a year.
Several factors combine to make recent grain and oilseed price increases impact poor countries more:
- Poor people buy more grains (e.g. wheat), and are more exposed to grain price changes.
- Poor people spend a higher portion of their income on food, so increasing food prices influence them more.
- Aid organizations which buy food and send it to poor countries see more need when prices go up but are able to buy less food on the same budget.
The impact is not all negative. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) recognizes the potential opportunities that the growing biofuel market offers to small farmers and aquaculturers around the world and has recommended small-scale financing to help farmers in poor countries produce local biofuel.
On the other hand, poor countries that do substantial farming have increased profits due to biofuels. If vegetable oil prices double, the profit margin could more than double. In the past rich countries have been dumping subsidized grains at below cost prices into poor countries and hurting the local farming industries. With biofuels using grains the rich countries no longer have grain surpluses to get rid of. Farming in poor countries is seeing healthier profit margins and expanding.
Interviews with local peasants in southern Ecuador provide strong anecdotal evidence that the high price of corn is encouraging the burning of tropical forests. The destruction of tropical forests now account for 20% of all greenhouse gas emmisons.
Read more about this topic: Food Vs. Fuel
Famous quotes containing the words impact on, impact, developing and/or countries:
“Too many existing classrooms for young children have this overriding goal: To get the children ready for first grade. This goal is unworthy. It is hurtful. This goal has had the most distorting impact on five-year-olds. It causes kindergartens to be merely the handmaidens of first grade.... Kindergarten teachers cannot look at their own children and plan for their present needs as five-year-olds.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“... the big courageous acts of life are those one never hears of and only suspects from having been through like experience. It takes real courage to do battle in the unspectacular task. We always listen for the applause of our co-workers. He is courageous who plods on, unlettered and unknown.... In the last analysis it is this courage, developing between man and his limitations, that brings success.”
—Alice Foote MacDougall (18671945)
“In some countries a hunting parson is no uncommon sight. Such a one might make a good shepherds dog, but is far from being the Good Shepherd.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)