Indirect land-use change emissions of biofuels and Rob Lyons' 'Are corporations ruining food?'

Turns out that indirect land-use changes from agricultural expansion due to biofuels growth may actually sometimes be universally good! Or at least not as bad as a lot of research papers I've read suggest...

Yesterday, I attended the ‘Are corporations ruining food?’ talk by Rob Lyons, author of Panic on a Plate: How Societies Developed an Eating Disorder (2011) and a blog; he very briefly expressed a very interesting viewpoint on the problem of land-use changes due to increasing food production, suggesting that these changes may actually have a positive effect. Since biofuel production has a similar mechanism to food crop production, I will explain his argument further using some other research on the topic.

He highlighted the fact that most land-use changes to meet the increasing food production occur in the developing countries, meaning that substituting crop production for biofuels in the developed countries should result in higher imports from the developing countries. Lyons sees this as a positive social consequence for the poorer countries, (which are arguably in greater need of socio-economic improvements than the developed countries) as at the moment developing countries have difficulties in doing this due to restrictions imposed by unions such as the EU in the act to protect its their members' welfare.

Additionally, he suggested that the environmental impacts of imports is lessened or even mitigated when taking into account the energy needs of growing crops in countries such as Britain, where the cool climate results in major light, heating and cold storage requirements. The growing of biofuels is likely to require significantly less energy if varieties are chosen to enable their growth without greenhouses.

There are some large-scale projects in the UK designed to produce food in this way, for example, Thanet Earth in Kent (Derbyshire, 2008). The argument goes that growing these crops in warmer countries such as Spain will be less energy-intensive, producing less GHG emissions during growth, local transportation and cold storage, often compensating for the transportation emissions (Edwards-Jones, 2010). These GHG emissions from indirect land-use changes will be made even smaller if they occur on lands storing relatively little carbon at present, such as degraded lands. The importance of these cultivation emissions of local produce can be especially seen when considering that it accounts for ~83% of emissions in countries such as the US, instead of 11% for transportation, including long-distance (Weber and Matthews, 2008).

This is thus a potentially important point, which should be taken into consideration when calculating biofuel land-use change emissions, but does not seem to be included in reports at the moment.

However, while these benefits of long-distance land-use changes as a result of biofuel cultivation may exist fo some crops, looking at the bigger picture here, this is only relevant in some circumstances e.g. apples imported from New Zealnd are only GHG-saving for short periods of time twice a year, while the other abundant local produce such as broccoli is best-grown in the UK still (Edwards-Jones, 2010). Additionally, no land-use changes can be beficial in the abundant cases of rainforest destruction, the impacts of which will be discussed later in the blog.  In conclusion, I agree with my fellow UCL blogger, Megan Smith (please read Megan's view on the talk from a purely food production perspective), that it is worrying that Lyons is diminishing the importance of environmental impacts of agricultural activities.