The Western world needs to reassess its rush to biofuels, which has done more harm pushing up food prices than it has good by reducing greenhouse gases, a United Nations report said yesterday.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said policies encouraging biofuel production and use in Europe and the United States was likely to maintain pressure on food prices but have little impact on weaning car users away from oil.

"The report finds that while biofuels will offset only a modest share of fossil energy use over the next decade they will have much bigger impacts on agriculture and food security," it said in its annual State of Food and Agriculture report.

Growing demand for biofuels will boost prices of agricultural commodities in the next 10 years, the report said.

For instance, if demand for biofuel agricultural feedstock rose 30 percent by 2010 from 2007, it would drive sugar prices up by 26 percent, maize prices by 11 percent and vegetable oil prices by 6 percent, FAO said.

With global stocks low and crops strongly dependent on weather, food prices would remain volatile, it said.

Anti-hunger campaigners have blamed biofuels, which convert crops such as maize, sugar, oil seeds and palm oil into liquid fuel for use in cars, for pushing up global food prices, contributing to soaring food bills in the last two years.

The global food import bill is expected to jump 26 percent to $1,035 billion in 2008, powered by price rises in rice, wheat and vegetable oils, FAO said.

Looking ahead to 2010, FAO forecast a 7 percent rise in the world output of main agricultural crops - wheat, rice, coarse grains, rapeseed, soybean, sunflower seed, palm oil and sugar - compared to 2007.

The food versus fuel debate was stoked last year when then UN envoy on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, said using arable land to make fuel was a "crime against humanity".

The FAO report uses far less dramatic language and does not quantify biofuels' contribution to commodity price spikes which were also due to poor harvests and rising demand.

But it does say the rise in biofuels has put more people at risk of hunger and requiring food aid and other assistance.

It also pours doubt on the claim that biofuels reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Crops soak up CO2 - the main greenhouse gas blamed for climate change - when they grow, but fuel used in their cultivation and processing reduces that efficiency and if trees are cleared to plant them, any gains can be lost.

(China Dialy via Agencies October 8, 2008)