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LINK: ‘Note Verbale‘, Manila Times (Sunday-Career Section) - 18 May 2008 Issue  

With fossil fuel getting scrimpy and prices of crude oil trading beyond $120 per barrel, governments have been pushing to replace a part of the current fuel mix with biofuels, essentially with ethanol and biodiesel, as an alternative.

Biofuel is any fuel derived from organic matter, most commonly from photosynthetic plants that capture solar energy. Unlike fossil fuel, which is derived from dead biological materials of long ago, or nuclear fuels, biofuel is renewable.

The process of creating biofuel as liquid fuel for transportation involves growing crops such as sugar and corn and using yeast fermentation to produce ethanol, or growing plants that naturally produce oil such as jathropa, palm or soybean which when processed chemically creates biodiesel.

Biofuels are regarded by many experts as environment friendly, a more affordable energy source and economically sustaining particularly to farmers.

The Philippines is among the many countries in the world that support and promote biofuels as an alternative source of energy. It is for this reason that the Biofuels Law was fast-tracked on May 6 a year ago.

They say the Philippines was the first country to legislate on the use of biofuel blends within its borders with the enactment of the Biofuels Law (Republic Act No. 9367). The law mandates all liquid fuels for motors and engines sold in the country should contain locally sourced biofuel components in order to reduce reliance from imported oil by providing certain incentives and punishments.

To avoid a potential clash with the issue affecting food security, the Department of Agriculture said that biodiesel would be produced from coconut, which is neither a food staple nor a major ingredient for animal feeds while bioethanol will not be sourced from sugar cane supplies destined for food and beverage application.

Right after Labor Day, BBC News reported that Belgian international law professor and special rapporteur on the right to food of the United Nations, Olivier de Schutter, urged a freeze on biofuel investment calling the blind pursuit of the policy as “irresponsible.” He said that the program drives food prices higher, threatening 100 million of the world’s poorest. His predecessor, Jean Ziegler, had condemned biofuels as a “crime against humanity” and called for an immediate ban on their use.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Rajendra Pachauri, a climate change scientist, cautioned the world in developing biofuels because of its perverse effects on the environment and higher food prices. Some environmentalists also blame biofuel programs for distorted government budgets and much of the deforestation in Southeast Asia and Brazil. Some scientists also claim that some types of biofuel generate as much carbon dioxide as the fossil fuels they replace.

In his article for Time magazine entitled: “The Clean Energy Scam,” Michael Grunwald reported that “new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it’s dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous . . . Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves.”

With the unabated price of fossil fuel in the international market, there is definitely a need to shift to alternative sources of energy. The world obviously needs oil as much as it needs food and needs to protect the environment.

It cannot be said that the use of biofuels is all that good. But it cannot be said also that it is all that bad. Whether it would bear either pernicious or beneficial consequences would heavily depend on how the political management of every nation could strike the balance in terms of state policies.

Like money, biofuels need not be the source of all evil.

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