from the hip

Biofuels have been hailed as a major solution to the challenge posed by high and rising oil prices. However, lately there have been more and more indications that this may not be the case.

Rising food prices (and rising futures prices on food as well) is one such indication. A rise in demand for food, resulting from among other economic growth in some rising economies, such as China, is another.

Now a World Bank report has been leaked (to the Guardian) that indicates that

biofuels have driven up global food prices by 75 percent, according to the Guardian report, accounting for more than half of the 140 percent jump in price since 2002 of the food examined by the study. The paper claims that the report, completed in April, was not made public in order to avoid embarrassing US President George W. Bush.

This is somewhat at odds with an US analysis recently that came to the conclusion that just 3 percent of the food price increases could be attributed to biofuels. The World Bank numbers seem high, but even so I have more confidence in them.

No doubt we will much more on this issue in the coming month. To me, however, it seems pretty clear that using land that could have been used for food to instead grow biofuels must be wrong. Thus, only to the extent that biofuels can be grown elsewhere, do I think they should be permitted. Also, seems to me, we need new types of plants that are much more effective than the ones currently used.

To me, this is a field that requires much more pondering as well as more research. Far too many politicians around the world have jumped on this train much too fast!

See also: Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis and
Poverty: 260m driven into hunger by push for biofuel

The current Norwegian government is getting more and more attention for their promises, big words and subsequent lack of action. Perhaps they assume that words speak louder than action in today’s media society. However, this may turn out to be a dangerous and wrong assumption.

Bob Geldorf recently visited Norway, to speak at an international conference on trade and peace at the Oslo City Hall. According to Aftenposten, he “praised Norway’s intentions to fight poverty and control global warming, but respectfully suggested that Norway could start by changing some of its own policies at home.

Specifically, Geldorf zeroed in on Norwegian politicians’ tendency to portray the country as a champion of the environment and human rights, at the same time as they consciously block agricultural imports from poor countries and pollute the environment with their oil and gas industry.”

Geldorf is not the first one to note this discrepancy between words and action. I seriously doubt that he well be that last.

Yet another wolf missing in Norway, writes the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten.

The wolves kill sheep, and many ranchers in Norway are extremely upset by the protection of the wolves. Conservationists fear that she has been killed by increasingly radical ranchers who want to see wolves wiped out. However, now police and conservationists are teaming up to hunt the illegal hunters.

The racnhers, or their associates, have also been reported to harass reseachers studying the wolves. When researcher Kenneth Larsen at Hedmark University College in Elverum returned to his car after a week studying the wolves, on a lonely forest road near Hafsjøen, he found three of his four tires slashed.

In a recent study reported by Aftenposten last week, wolf researchers claimed that half of the deaths of Scandinavian wolves during the past year are blamed on illegal hunting.