Learning Objective: This is a news review class. At the end of the session, the participants are expected to be able to identify the pros and cons of using biofuel in place of gasoline in line with the news article.

Like much of the rest of the world, Europe has invested heaps of money and even more hope in the promise of biofuels to provide secure supplies of environmentally friendly energy.
But now rising food prices, trade tensions and social unrest are prompting a rethink of the E.U.'s ambitious hopes for running its cars and trucks on biofuel.

The latest call for a change of course came from economist Jeffrey Sachs, special adviser to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who this week urged the European Parliament to scrap the E.U.'s much-touted target of increasing biofuel's share in Europe's diesel and gasoline consumption to 10% by 2020.

Last year, E.U. governments spent an estimated 3.7 billion euros ($5.2 billion) on subsidising biofuel production.
Sachs, who also criticized the U.S. biofuels program, said biofuels compete with food for farming land and help push up food prices, hurting the world's poor worst of all.

"We need to cut back significantly on our biofuels programs," he said. "They were understandable at a time of much lower food prices and larger food stocks but do not make sense now in a global food scarcity condition."


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Let's discuss.
1. How true is this?
2. How does the study appeal to you?
3. Is it possible that while we are trying to solve the oil crisis, we are actually heading to food crisis?