A crime against humanity?

I was going to call this post “food or fuels?”, but then I read this item on the BBC News website.

This is a bit over the top isn’t it? Calling bio-fuels “a crime against humanity”?

The term usually makes me think of events in places like Kosovo, people being charged in The Hague, or even back to the Nuremberg trials of the 1940s. Am I committing a crime against humanity? I thought I was trying to save the planet!

It’s a thought that I touched on in the Monday Podcast a couple of weeks ago – should we be growing all these plants (regardless of which ones) to make bio-fuels, when there are people on the planet that don’t have enough to eat? Most often, Africa is brought up in the discussion.

But is it really that simple? If we didn’t turn the crops into fuel, would they be exported to Third World countries to stop people from starving? Somehow, I doubt it.

But these countries are also affected by Global Warming – in fact, isn’t it often the case that such countries are quoted as being affected but without themselves producing very much of the greenhouse gasses? They suffer at the hands of the industrialised nations, and don’t have much of a chance to cut down emissions themselves?

So I’m wondering if the process is a little bit more complicated than just growing food to eat and shipping it out there. If we can reduce Global Warming, will there be less drought in Third World countries and hence more chance of growing food – in the countries themselves?

In which case, anything we can do to reduce emissions good, right?

Perhaps the UN should have another think about the problem, before they make more such bold statements…