Bio Fuels Are Not a Solution

Bio Fuels threatens the homes, livelihoods, and food resources of the poorest of the poor in this world. Already, while we have food enough to feed the world, the cost of distribution prevents the hungry from being fed. The more arable land devoted to bio fuel, the less food their will be. And the less subsistence communities there will be in the third world.
How many people are we willing to starve for bio fuel?
Al Jazeera

The natives of Indonesia and Malaysia are among 60 million indigenous people facing the threat of being driven off their lands to make way for an expansion of biofuel crops around the world, the head of a UN panel has said.


Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, chairwoman of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, said the explosion of biofuel crop cultivation threatened to destroy native cultures by forcing them into big cities.


Indonesia and Malaysia are among those most at risk because together they produce 80 per cent of the world's palm oil - one of the crops used to make biofuels.


Tauli-Corpuz said that in one Indonesian province, West Kalimantan, the UN had identified five million indigenous people who were likely to be displaced because of the expansion in the production of biofuel crops.


Indigenous people who depend on forests almost entirely for their survival are being forced to migrate to already overcrowded cities, where many of them end up living in slums with limited access to services and poor housing, Ida Nicolaisen, an expert in indigenous cultures and member of the UN forum, said.