ANALYSIS:THE WARNING by UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon last week that escalating food prices may evolve into a crisis of global proportions provided a potent reminder that the advent of biofuels has been a double-edged sword, writes Harry McGee.
Prices of basic food staples like rice, grain, vegetable oil and sugar have risen by at least half since 2007, because of supply difficulties, and have caused critical shortages in many developing countries.
And one of the key factors has been the use of crops for biofuels. When ethanol and other types of fuel were first produced from crops like maize and sugar cane, there were high hopes it would be an environmentally friendly way of substantially reducing the world's dependence on fossil fuels such as gas and oil.
However, for over a year now, environmental groups and - more lately - political figures have been saying that the so-called "first generation" biofuels do not provide the panacea solution once claimed.
The race to grow crops for fuel in North and South America (ethanol production in the US has risen from three billion litres in 1995 to 35 billion litres in 2007) has meant that fuel crops have replaced food crops. They have also displaced farmers in South America, pushing them to further encroach on rainforests - thus bringing a serious environmental downside.
And the sustainability of such crops has also come under fire. To fill the tank of an SUV takes as much grain as will feed a family in a year.
The European Union has set ambitious targets and has committed to ensure that biofuels and renewable fuels make up 10 per cent of Europe's transport needs by 2020.
In February last year, the then minister for energy Noel Dempsey adopted those targets for Ireland and also set two very ambitious intermediate targets when setting out a biofuels obligation. He said that 2.2 per cent of the transport fuel market would come from biofuels by the end of 2008 and that there would be another - extraordinarily high - target of 5.75 per cent by the beginning of 2010.
These remain the Irish targets. And in the Dáil last week, current Minister for Energy Eamon Ryan said that Ireland was still committed to that target. However, to achieve that will mean the Government - and the Green Party in particular - will have to swallow hard in relation to two unpalatable realities.
First, the indigenous biofuel sector in Ireland, while growing, is still tiny. The Government's bioenergy action plan for Ireland included figures for 2005 which showed that it made up only 0.3 per cent of the market. The corollary of that is that Ireland has no choice but to rely on heavy imports of biofuels if it is to meet that target, and the more ambitious 10 per cent target by 2020. The action plan fully accepted that Ireland would face a nigh-impossible task in meeting the 5.75 per cent target by 2010 from indigenous sources alone. To produce ethanol and biodiesel would require the use of 255,000 hectares for rapeseed and cereals, well in excess of half of the total area devoted to tillage at present.
The second problem is that, if Ireland is to meet the targets, it will need to import the self-same first-generation biofuels that have led to higher food prices - and may be actually increasing carbon emissions because rainforest has had to be cleared to produce them.
When in opposition, Ryan did question first-generation biofuels. He has stressed (as his party did at its recent national conference) that the production of biofuels must be environmentally sustainable and must not come at the expense of depriving the poorest people in the world of food and nourishment.
Thus he has added his voice to that of the British government and the EU's trade commissioner Peter Mandelson in calling for a sustainable policy.
That, in essence, means a concentration on so-called "second-generation" biofuels which are produced from non-food crops grown on land. They include lingo-cellulosic crops such as grasses and willow, the stalks of wheat and corn, wood and special energy crops such as miscanthus.
Some of those will have more potential in a temperate climate like Ireland than first-generation crops such as sugar beet, rapeseed, maize and wheat.
The difficulty - and it not a trivial one - is that second-generation biofuels (and third-generation biofuels like algae) are still in development and cannot yet be fully deployed.
So the Government, to meet its 5.75 per cent target, will have to rely on biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel produced from less-clean energy crops.
As Ryan acknowledged in the Dáil last week, these are generally sourced on the open internationally traded commodities market with little or no information about their origin.
"It is correct that, under World Trade Organisation rules, we cannot differentiate between biofuels from one country or another and we do not have full traceability in place to examine the origin of the supply," he accepted.
Both Fine Gael and Labour have said that Ryan and his department lack a cohesive plan on biofuels at present. His response is that Ireland cannot act alone in this regard and must make its response in concert with the European Union.
There is a second argument that seems a contentious one for a Green Party minister to make, as it is putting security of supply above environmental considerations.
"If we suffered a serious oil shock similar to the 1970s when oil from the Middle East was cut off, it would benefit us to have even a 5 per cent availability of fuel supply that would keep essential machinery running. For that strategic policy reason alone, we should develop such a supply but we should be careful that it is not at the expense of the world poor," he told the Dáil.
But the problem is that it is impossible to know - under the present EU and Irish biofuel policies - if that is the case.
Harry McGee is a Political Staff reporter