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)
“As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choicethere is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.”
—Thomas S. Kuhn (b. 1922)
“Every society consists of men in the process of developing from children into parents. To assure continuity of tradition, society must early prepare for parenthood in its children; and it must take care of the unavoidable remnants of infantility in its adults. This is a large order, especially since a society needs many beings who can follow, a few who can lead, and some who can do both, alternately or in different areas of life.”
—Erik H. Erikson (19041994)
“General education is the best preventive of the evils now most dreaded. In the civilized countries of the world, the question is how to distribute most generally and equally the property of the world. As a rule, where education is most general the distribution of property is most general.... As knowledge spreads, wealth spreads. To diffuse knowledge is to diffuse wealth. To give all an equal chance to acquire knowledge is the best and surest way to give all an equal chance to acquire property.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (18221893)