Agrofuels and Food Security: FAO Develops New Approach

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has developed an "analytical framework"1to better understand how the development of agrofuels will impact agriculture, which will help to inform government decision-making in this field.

To this end, the framework is the underpinning of the work carried out for the FAO's Bio-Energy and Food Security project (BEFS),2 whose purpose is to better evaluate the risks and opportunities generated by the development of agrofuels, whose effects remain relatively unclear for the moment.

Indeed, although the expansion of agrofuels could support rural development and increase incomes, it could just as easily trigger not only conflicts of use (water and land) between food and energy production, but also high price volatility for agricultural raw materials. This would directly threaten the food security of States.

The new tool will help policy-makers in the choices they make in terms of bioenergy policy by determining a country's optimal "agrofuel potential" and identifying which populations are most vulnerable to food insecurity.

This initiative by the FAO3 to develop an analytical framework specifically for the issue of agrofuels supports the international agricultural markets approach that WOAgri adopted two years ago in building its WOAGRI model and developing tools adapted to the specific characteristics of agriculture.

1 Designed by economists at the FAO, the Copernicus Institute at the University of Utrecht (Netherlands) and Oeko-Institut Darmstadt (Germany), the tool draws on existing tools for mathematical modeling. Indeed, the FAO has indicated that "[in developing the framework], such tools will be used as Quickscan, which calculates the global potential for bioenergy by 2050, and the FAO's COSIMO [partial equilibrium economic model], which models the agricultural sector in a large number of developing countries."
2 For more information: http://www.fao.org/nr/ben/befs/index.html
3 Currently being tested in three countries (Peru, Thailand and Tanzania), the tool will soon be available to the entire international community.