Should energy be a product of 21st century agriculture in developing countries?
Recent policies fostering use of alternative, renewable energy sources in the industrialized world confront developing countries with diverse opportunities and challenges: how to integrate with potential biofuel markets, deal with impacts on food security, alleviate poverty, and manage crop and natural resources sustainably. Biofuels should form part of a global, cross-cutting agenda of agricultural research, involving partners in the farming and energy sectors. Work should generate public goods, including broad-based knowledge, enabling technology, and tools for assessment. The agricultural systems required will feature, among other things, sustainable production and efficient use of biomass, partitioning it among energy, feed, food and CO2 fixation demands. They should be more efficient and propoor, and use existing farmland or marginal (dry, waterlogged, saline) tracts. Organizations such as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and its research centers may play the following roles: Developer of analytical tools. Policy analyst and advocate for bio-energy, livelihoods and food security. Provider of allele sources or advanced lines and populations of improved crop cultivars. Catalyzer of research on useful crop traits and effective cropresource management. Proprietary technology broker to ensure bio-energy at the village level. Knowledge-sharing facilitator throughout the bio-energy value chain. Knowledge integrator for complex food-feed-fiber-fuel environmental service systems. Public-private partnerships will have to engage the broader agricultural and development policy research community, addressing the following issues in ways that benefit farmers and consumers: Possible tradeoffs of food/feed/fiber versus fuel. Under what conditions could the demand for biofuels—especially from food crop sources—increase food or feed prices and affect food security, locally or globally? Environmental costing of biofuels. The energy output should be higher than the energy used to produce a given biofuel. Less water-demanding biofuels than current alternatives. Environmental services: eco-friendly biofuels may reduce Cemissions, mitigating climate change. Opportunity windows and risks from biofuels, particularly for resource-poor producers and consumers. Energy institutions and bio-energy management. Policy-driven versus user-demand effects. What are the roles of governments and their expectations in the face of unstable and rising oil prices? Other political or economic considerations? Partnerships and roles for international, regional, or national research organizations: how to foster innovative research for development to produce food and energy, while expanding the ecologically-friendly use of marginal or waste lands, increasing incomes and providing new labor options for the poor. The role of public agricultural research organizations to speed the development and adoption of second generation, lignocellulose biofuel technologies. The agenda for crop improvement will include increasing plant grain and biomass productivity, optimizing the chemical and physical attributes of biofuel sources, and improving specific traits in first- and second-generation biofuel crops, within a framework of sustainable agriculture. Frontier approaches should be applied to study the possible advantages of perennial biofuel crops that are more photosynthetically productive, entail lower input costs, and improve soil nutrient input and retention. Through alliances with the bio-energy industry, research should also adapt industrial processes to biomass sources and sources to promising processes.
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Conference Proceedings biblioteca |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
CIMMYT
2007
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| Subjects: | AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES AND BIOTECHNOLOGY, DEVELOPING COUNTRIES, RENEWABLE ENERGY, BIOFUELS, FOOD SECURITY, BIOTECHNOLOGY, CONSERVATION AGRICULTURE, |
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10883/1088 |
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