Michael Pascoe’s made many valid critiques of the biofuels industry in Crikey yesterday. However, much of the debate around biofuels by policymakers, climate change activists and commentators overlooks the massive impact escalating biofuel usage in the west is having on the developing world.

Questions about the priorities – and the grasp of basic economics – of many supporters of the biofuel industry should be on every government’s agenda given the increasing empirical evidence as to the impact of the demand for biofuels on hunger in the developing world.

Josette Sheeran, Executive Director of the World Food Programme, hardly an apologist organization for Big Oil, had this to say about the impact of western demand for biofuels in an interview with the Financial Times in July: “The UN body has seen prices it pays for maize rise by up to 120 per cent in the past six months in some countries.”

It’s simple economics. You can have grain production to serve the demands of the west and their demand for clean and green biofuels or grain production to feed the world’s most impoverished.

You cannot have your maize cake and eat it too. This argument was made best by Lester Brown, President of the Worldwatch Institute. In The Guardian last month he said: “The competition for grain between the world’s 800 million motorists, who want to maintain their mobility, and its two billion poorest people, who are simply trying to survive, is emerging as an epic issue.”

Every time you hear the word biofuel, you should think about the real winners and losers.

The winners are all those on the biofuels gravy train. The big losers are the most impoverished and disadvantaged people on the planet.

It’s all very well for many environmentalists and biofuel-industry sponsored talk fests to say that in forty years millions of the poor in the developing world will die from climate change.

If you read the UN, OECD and various NGO reports, the west’s’ newfound love of biofuels will likely ensure that most will have already starved anyway. If you truly care about hunger in the developing world in the next few years and you want a car buy a Hummer not a biofuel Citroen.