I know this is OT, but I couldn’t seem to comment there. Re http://www.stephenfranks.co.nz/green-perspective.php I suggest you actually read up on stuff rather then talking bull. Whatever you think of biofuels, one thing that is abundantly clear is that there is little evidence the current world food problem has little to do with biofuels but it appears to be a lot to do with other things like the rising cost of oil (used to make fertilisers and in other parts of the food cycle), the increasing middle class of the developed world (meaning access to more food and more varied food particularly meat which is of course extremely inefficient use of resources) and a whole bunch of other factors. Biofuels do have a lot of problems, and may very well affect food prices a lot in the future, and whether they are a good idea or not is a matter of great debate, but a wild, simplistic and unproven claims don’t help anyway. One interesting thing of course is that in a number of countries, e.g. Malaysia and Indonesia, they are increasing land usage for agriculture, particularly biofuels, at a high rate. This means in their cases, they may not be strongly competing with food. Trouble is of course, this means they are cutting down a lot of their rainforests and particularly in the case of Indonesia, draining their peat swamps. These have a whole bunch of other consequences which people don’t like. Trouble is, no one has come up with a way for them to develop without using more land. While I don’t have the statistics off hand, I’m pretty sure as with most developing countries, they actually have a much larger amount of their land still untouched then most developed countries because they are developing later but even though all the developed countries already cut down a lot of their forests etc, these countries are not allowed to do the same. Indeed in Indonesia they often burn their forests, partially because they know they can’t sell the wood because no one wants it because it’s ‘evil’ unsustainable rainforest wood. All-in-all, a sad state of affairs, not helped by either the Greenies who like to tell others what they can’t do without offering solutions as to what they can do, nor the right-wing like you who like to blame all the developed countries for their evil development when we are now being the ‘super-good’ planet-friendly countries saving the world, when in reality us (the developed countries) did the same thing a long time ago and often at the expense of these countries (then colonies).