The increasing demand for biofuel production as a source of energy has considerably pushed up prices of some food crops, experts say. The price of maize, for example, has risen 60 percent over the past two years.

Such concerns were raised when farmers representatives met in Rome last week at the Farmers Forum, a platform for dialogue launched in 2005 by the U.N. International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), based in Rome.

IFAD launched the forum in 2005 in line with its mandate to eradicate rural poverty through involvement of small farmers and their organisations from developing areas in the development of its strategies and programmes.

The two-day forum preceded the 2008 Governing Council meeting of IFAD (Feb. 13-14), which marked the 30th anniversary of the Fund. This year the council addressed the issues of climate change, biofuels expansion, and rising commodity prices.

The Farmers Forum and the Governing Council jointly called on member states to "urgently direct their policy attention and their investments towards smallholder agriculture and rural livelihoods."

New factors have come to the fore, experts say. "The current crisis has nothing in common with others that occurred previously, because in the past the increase of food prices was essentially linked to harvest trends -- a poor harvest meant food scarcity and consequent rising prices," Henry Saragih, international executive secretary of La Via Campesina, a farmers movement that brings together 140 rural organisations in 56 countries, told IPS.

Now, he said, "mechanisms that push up prices are mainly linked to unfair global market rules and to factors such as climate change, which are significantly conditioning the production of cereals in some affected countries like Australia."

As the demand on agriculture for energy grows rapidly to meet the demand of the transportation sector -- principally bio-ethanol from grains and bio-diesel from vegetable oils and animal fat -- considerable land could be further diverted from food to fuel crops production.

Without specific public policies to regulate the agricultural market and the production flow, farmers say, food security could be seriously affected, and the price of some basic crops like maize, soy and rice could rise further.

In this situation, focused policies and programmes will be needed to protect rural communities from further negative impacts, but also to help them benefit from potential biofuels opportunity.

"Higher food prices and the potential of biofuels represent a double-edged sword for the rural poor, creating opportunities as well as challenges," says IFAD president Lennart Båge.

Rising food prices could make small-scale agriculture more productive and economically viable, he said, even as it poses risks to net buyers of food. "And biofuels -- especially second generation biofuels that can be grown on marginal lands -- could offer smallholder farmers significant new income sources."

These two trends are making the rural space "more attractive" for investments, leading bio-genetic expert Prof. M.S. Swaminathan told IPS. "But we need to ask ourselves what will be the risks of their impacts on the rural poor, and how they will really benefit from the bio-energy revolution."

To do so, he said, it is necessary to ensure that every rural and bio-energy programme is pro-poor. This can be achieved by designing and implementing policy measures that ensure that the growing use of bio-energy is conducive to reducing poverty and hunger, he said.

Recognising biofuels as an emerging market opportunity for the poor, IFAD has recently financed two research grants focusing on biofuel crops that can grow in adverse agro-ecological conditions, such as jatropha, pongamia, sweet sorghum and cassava, to enable poor rural people take advantage of the huge demand for biofuel production.

But can that ensure that small-scale farmers do not become losers in this process?

Matthew Wyatt, assistant president of the external affairs department of IFAD, says that is a complex question to answer. "What we want to make sure is that to the extent that biofuels represent a threat to small farmers, we have to help them to handle that; to the extent that it provides an opportunity, we have to help them exploiting these opportunities."

In some areas, he told IPS, there may well be opportunities for small farmers to grow biofuels, "perhaps on land that was not able to produce anything else, and that clearly would be a benefit to them. In other cases there are risks that the rush for the biofuels could be a threat for poor farmers -- many of whom do not have secure access to their land; in worst cases they may be even driven off their land." (END/2008)

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