January 16, 2008 | 12:00am
The food-versus-fuel scare has taken Congress by storm. Lawmakers are beginning to weigh if massive planting of oilseeds for fuel would cut the food supply as it did in America. Citing recent opinions, Senate energy head Miriam Santiago worries that, with RP’s small landmass, “biofuels will tend to encroach food production.” House minority point man Roilo Golez predicts peril to food security if a million of the nation’s 30 million hectares will be used for biodiesel and bioethanol.
Truly unsettling are news reports. Time this week blamed the shift to biofuel farming for surges of US food rates last year. Cereal and baked products prices rose 5.2 percent; meat, poultry, fish and eggs, 5.4 percent; dairy, 14 percent; and beer, 3.7 percent. “The trend may well continue,” the magazine stated, “since the latest energy bill calls for a fivefold increase in the use of alternative fuels in the US gasoline supply by 2022.” Last Nov. The Economist noted a climb in worldwide tags of flour, corn and wheat by as much as 75 percent since 2005. It coincides with UN estimates that about 25 million hectares of farmlands shifted from food to fuel.
Scientists and conservationists too ironically been cautioning of late against making clean fuels out of plants to replace dirty crude oil. Santiago echoes the fear of 1998 Nobel laureate Hartmut Michel, a Manila visitor last week. Said he, while biofuels emit no fumes, the burning of Asian forests to mass-produce them discharges carbon dioxide that causes global warming. Golez in turn cites 1995 Nobel prize chemist Paul Crutzen, whose research on ozone layer depletion convinced the world of climate change. Crutzen has theorized that biofuel extraction produces nitrous oxides that choke like carbon exhausts.
All those fears may not apply to the Philippines, though. To begin with, the country is not short of land for food. Citing Asian Development Bank studies, PNOC-Alternative Fuels Corp. head Peter Anthony Abaya laments that six million hectares are unfarmed. His state firm advocates the planting of the physic nut (local name tuba-tuba) for biodiesel in such idle lands. Also known as jatropha, the inedible nut need not crowd out food crops from arable plots. Abaya has been teaching farmers to put to good use marginal lands on steep hillsides or swamps, where they can grow jatropha for extra cash. AFC chairman Rene Velasco, in a recent Mindanao tour, saw about 700,000 hectares of such lands for jatropha cultivation. The job is not all AFC’s. The agriculture department, of course, has to introduce food crops as well, and the agrarian reform office must put in rural finance. In short, a six-million-hectare pie of idle lands is only waiting to be divided among suitable food and fuel crops.
Another 15 million hectares, half of RP territory, are denuded forests. Unlike in Malaysia where poor farmers and big conglomerates alike are converting rainforests into biofuel plantations, the Philippines hardly has any left. The problem is to reforest, not to cry about the deforestation of the 1970s-1980s. Again, jatropha can come to the rescue. Denuded mountains and seashores can be replanted with the nut that no one will cut down because of its oil yield. The tree can mature in three to four years to prevent landslides and floods. Again, it can bring extra income to rural folk, whose problem is not so much the supply of food than the money to buy it with.
The food-versus-fuel debate can be touchy in the field of bioethanol, however. Sugarcane and corn, the best sources of gasoline replacements, are edible unlike jatropha. Thus, their use as biofuels can take sweeteners, cereals and animal feeds from food makers and consumers. Sen. Mar Roxas in fact had foreseen the problem when the Biofuels Bill was being discussed in 2006. He inserted a rider banning the setting up of bioethanol refineries too near sugar mills. Still, food security experts cite the steep rise in feed corn and wheat prices in recent months that threaten to push up prices of pork and chicken as well.
But the solution might not be in choosing between food and fuel. It could lie in biotechnology; that is, in increasing crop yields through better science from seeding to harvesting to storing. Brazil is the best example of this. Although it holds natural gas reserves, the South American country decided to go full-blast in extracting “gasohol” from sugarcane. As Brazil developed car engines that could take in up to 80-percent ethanol, it also cultivated the best-yielding sugarcane varieties. It recently discovered a huge offshore reserve of crude oil. But that find was nothing compared to the maturing a decade ago of cane stalks seven times thicker than usual.
About the same time in Luzon’s Central Plains, sugar planters also searched for a new variety. Lahar from Pinatubo’s eruption had engulfed plantations, so they needed ones that could withstand the white goo. They found passable substitutes to the known strains of Negros and Batangas. The lahar problem has since passed. It may be time for them, and other cane growers as well, to look for still higher-yielding types.
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