Food vs fuel essay

History[ edit ] In the USA, the local food movement has been traced to the creation of the Agricultural Adjustment Act AAA ofwhich spawned today's controversial agricultural subsidies and price supports. These largely unsuccessful resolutions encouraged increased local production to slow farmland loss. The program described "sustainable diets" - a term then new to the American public. At the time, the resolutions were met with strong criticism from pro-business institutions, but have had a strong resurgence of backing since

Food vs fuel essay

Energy density - Wikipedia

Biodiesel is an Additional Market for Farmers Introduction Because biodiesel can displace petroleum diesel, and because it produces less air pollution and has a low carbon footprint, some people hope biodiesel and other biofuels can be the answer to our dependence on imported oil and the environmental problems caused by fossil fuels.

Other people worry that, if we vastly increase the amount of acreage given to growing crops for biofuels production, we will cause Food vs fuel essay food shortage. Only two different major types of biofuels are used as transportation Food vs fuel essay at the present time: Ethanol is made from corn, sorghum, or sugar cane, and is used in engines that run on gasoline.

Biodiesel is made from vegetable oils or animal fats, and is used in diesel engines. Worldwide, significantly more ethanol is produced than biodiesel. Inthe United States produced roughly nine billion gallons of ethanol, and nearly million gallons of biodiesel Renewable Fuels Association; National Biodiesel Board.

Most of the food versus fuel debate involves ethanol. We will focus on biodiesel in this article. For more information on ethanol and food, see Food vs. Societies must always make decisions about how to allocate biomass use among these five.

It can be difficult to tell if oilseed production for biodiesel is cutting into food supplies, since many outside factors influence food prices, including trade policies, worldwide population growth, and bad weather, which reduced yields in many countries in and One way of gauging the effect of biodiesel production on food prices is to compare changes in how much consumers pay for food, with changes in the price farmers receive for oilseed crops.

For example, in the United States, as the price of oilseeds bought from farmers peaked inso did food prices to consumers. The food versus fuel debate was covered widely at this time, with several articles in national news magazines. But when the price of oilseeds from farmers fell, food prices to consumers dipped just a bit.

In reality, the ingredients in food are just one small part of the price of food. Vegetable oils in particular are a small part of most foods.

Food vs fuel essay

Figure 1 shows that the price farmers received for soybeans the major oilseed crop in the United States more than doubled from the beginning of to mid, and then dropped by over 40 percent before starting to rise again through This time period coincides with the period of rapid growth of the biodiesel industry, which reached a peak production of million gallons in Although other oils are used in the United States, soy oil is by far the most common, and the prices of other oils tend to follow soy oil prices.

Producer Price Index, Soybeans When the price of soy oil dropped, consumer food prices continued to rise through the end ofpeaking as the price of soybeans hit a low in October, and falling barely two percent inas shown in Figure 2. This indicates only a weak connection between the price paid for soybeans, which is determined by supply and demand, and food prices paid by consumers.

Consumer Price Index, Food at Home One other very relevant factor with a significant impact on food prices is the cost of energy, and, in particular, petroleum. Petroleum, mainly in the form of diesel fuel, is used throughout the food chain in tractors for growing the commodity crop, for chemical and fertilizer manufacture, in trucks to transport the raw materials to processing facilities, and for distribution to the end-use consumer.

Therefore, the price of petroleum can affect the final price of food to consumers. The following graph Figure 3 presents data on the monthly price of diesel fuel from through The price nearly doubled during this brief period of time.

Monthly Diesel Fuel Price From these data, it does not appear that processing oil into biodiesel is cutting into the U. These data represent only a brief snapshot of the economic balance between food and fuel.

Biofuels - Food or Fuel?

Increasing yields of oilseeds will play an important role in the ongoing balance between these two societal needs. If, as a country, we were to decide to vastly increase the amount of acres devoted to oilseed crops for biodiesel production, this could conceivably cut into food production.

For example, in order to grow enough rapeseed which produces more oil per acre than soybeans to replace the petro-diesel currently used for on-highway transportation in the United States, all available harvested and idle land would have to be given over to rapeseed Van Gerpen et al. Obviously, this would not be a good idea for our country.

Biodiesel production uses only the soy oil, which is normally extracted from the beans before feeding the soy meal to livestock. Therefore, use of soy oil for biodiesel does not prevent animals from eating the soy meal left after the oil is extracted.

Other oilseed meals, such as canola meal, are also used for animal feed. Biodiesel from Waste and Non-edible Biomass Used vegetable oil collected for processing. Biodiesel can be produced in a way that does not cut into food supplies. For example, it certainly makes sense to use waste oil and fat from restaurants and food-processing plants to produce biodiesel.

It makes sense to use extra stocks of oil not needed for other purposes, to research new oilseed crops that can be grown on marginal land and to use non-edible oils from plants already growing in many areas.

Scientists are currently researching ways to produce biodiesel using new feedstocks that are less limited by the availability of land.Forget ‘food vs fuel’ – it’s ‘food AND fuel’ The idea that the EU biofuels policy has had an impact on the global food supply or contributed to hunger is a myth.

In fact, European ethanol production uses a minuscule share of the EU grain harvest, only 2 percent (net) in – not enough to reduce grain supply to food markets or.


Food, Inc. And The Food Industry - also showed many visual claim by filming all the interviews with the peoples but also inside a farms or factories to show how they raise and slaughtered the animals.

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Food vs. fuel - Wikipedia