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BERLIN (Reuters) - Bad agricultural policies and changing eating habits in
developing nations are primarily to blame for rising food prices, not
biofuel production as some critics claim, German Chancellor Angela Merkel
said on Thursday.
Environmentalists and humanitarian groups have stepped up campaigning
against biofuels, arguing they divert production away from food and animal
feed while contributing to sharp rises in the price of cereals and milk
products.
But Merkel, whose country is Europe's largest biofuel producer, said the
rise in food prices was not mainly due to biofuels but to "inadequate
agricultural policies in developing countries" as well as "insufficient
forecasts of changes in nutritional habits" in emerging markets.
"If you travel to India these days, then a main part of the debate is about
the 'second meal'," Merkel said.
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"People are eating twice a day, and if a third of one billion people in
India do that, it adds up to 300 million people. That's a large part of the
European Union," she said.
"And if they suddenly consume twice as much food as before and if 100
million Chinese start drinking milk too, then of course our milk quotas
become skewed, and much else too," she said referring to EU limits on dairy
production.
Biofuels, which are seen by supporters as a way to increase energy security
and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, are made mainly from food crops such as
grains, oilseeds and sugar.
Critics argue there are few, if any, environmental benefits for so-called
first generation biofuels. They have also been blamed for increasing grain
demand and pushing up prices at a time of growing threat of famine in some
parts of the world.
The FAO and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD
) have said biofuels were "one of the main drivers" for forecasts of food
price increases of 20 percent to 50 percent by 2016.
(Reporting by Gernot Heller, editing by Kerstin Gehmlich and Mary Gabriel) |
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