"Food Vs Fuel" is a "Fool Vs Fool" debate for India- Bioenergy saves both.

If someone asks you to pick the main causes for climate change (and of course there are myriad) the two broad themes you'd land up on are just these- Food & Fuel.

Our lust for energy has made us excavate half the planet looking for fossil fuels, releasing CO2 trapped for millions of years back into the atmosphere while our need (somehow using "lust" here doesn't seem right) for food has made us clear millions of hectares of forests in the last century to convert them into arable land, once again choking Mama Earth by her sea-green throat.

So Food and Fuel are not that different from each other, in fact when you think about it, they are not different at all. Man needs food as a fuel to run his body and he needs fuel fuel to run the world. And yet it doesn't feel okay to use lust and food in the same sentence but is entirely appropriate to do so when speaking about energy?

Maybe the answer to this is rooted in the fact that such a large portion of our global population is still underfed and undernourished.

UN's SDGs for 2030 which includes Zero Hunger as its second goal seems so simple on a flyer, but to think that while the world even currently produces roughly 40% more food than it can consume, our target to reach zero global hunger by even 2030 is most likely to be spectacular failure.

The food we have is unevenly distributed and consumed. There are parts of the planet where food security is bubble wrapped in seven layers of agricultural technology, policy support and equipment and then there are parts of the world where the whole crop cycle is governed as per the mercy of Lady Rain and when she shows her wrath, hundreds if not thousands die.

But you know what?

Climate Change has a big role to play in this threatening nope, obliteration of food security for so many countries (including India).

The rice production in India has fallen by more than 20%, same story for wheat, pulses, sugarcane and most things. The rainfall patterns are now inconsistent and adverse, the whole concept of "seasons" has been reduced to themes for writing love songs , the Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) which is already low in most of India and a crucial component of soil and subsequent crop health is now completely at the mercy of fertilizers. The so called "Green" Revolution is finally extracting its tolls from the farmers and water tables of Punjab and Haryana.

So if there is a single largest threat to food security today- it is climate change and that's my precise problem with whoever preaches from the gospel of "Food Vs Fuel" as if both exist in two different silos independent from each other.

Of course, agriculture causes its own GHG emissions, but given that the land use remains the same- this just dwarves in comparison to what fossil fuels vomit in the atmosphere everyday so the fact of the matter is we need biofuels to work out, if we want to leave our next generation with even an iota of a chance.

Since I have been working in the sugar industry, I have had the opportunity to observe this up close. The sugar industry in India is also the largest producer of Bioethanol for the country which goes into blending with Petrol. Even by the most conservative estimates we have crossed a rate of 10% blending in the country- what this means is that is how much fossil fuel we have been able to eradicate from our mobility system.

The target is to reach 20% by 2025.

On the other hand if you look at EVs that require so much supporting infrastructure and currently have such a big manufacturing carbon footprint and use coal based power from the grid to charge in most cases to "decarbonize" the mobility sector, you'd realize how much you need Biofuels to work, especially for a country like India that has a majority of its population dependent on agriculture.

This is a whole other dimension of this debate that we need to unpack a bit. With declining agricultural productivity and the rise of climate related extreme weather events, the farmers in India among whom majority are either landless or have very little land form one of the most distressed communities.

The Farmer Suicide Rate has sky rocketed and today one in every five suicides in India is committed by a farmer. Low income levels is the primary and most critical factor behind this and as a country we have been struggling to find a balance between keeping the food prices low and farmer incomes high at the same time since the very beginning of our Tryst with destiny.

Biofuels again are a thing of beauty when seen in context of this problem. Hear me out- only recently ONGC found some fossil fuel reserves near Mumbai and the whole country was celebrating because we know we can save up to millions in Forex drains and have a secure supply of energy at the same time. Never mind the fossil fuel part and what will that do to our collective security, but we know that energy anywhere is a highly valuable resource that needs to be tapped into.

Biofuel challenges this very monopoly of some countries in the world (or some entities in a country) over energy production. Biofuel is an opportunity for farmers to become the oil producers of the country- that's a win win no matter how you think about it.

The price of sugar may not have changed much in the last 50 years, but the price of oil knows only one direction that is upwards, here is how you can increase that farmer's income- instead of her just feeding you, let her also run your car.

It is possible today, part of it is being executed also. There are strains of crops available that are meant not for consumption but only biofuel production with much higher yields, but if their adoption gets drowned in this cacophony of "Food Vs Fuel" raised almost exclusively by people with full bellies who I think do not have half an understanding of how climate change or this country works the ultimate sufferer will only be the farmer of India. She has for the first time an opportunity to truly change her fate, get a good price for her produce without shattering the careful balance of "fair price" for food and at the same time mitigate climate change which is ruining her productivity and yields.

Our government currently is in the midst of feeding more than 80 crore families for free since the onset of COVID 19 so that the country doesn't collapse into a famine. So obviously no one is trying to starve millions of people to drive a thousand cars. Food will always be a higher priority because that is an intrinsic character of our very nature as humans- it's been coded in our DNA that we need food to function, that we will simply die without it. But the world similarly also needs energy to function and since cars don't eat chapatis we can either feed them gasoline or run them on biofuels (would that technically mean that cars now do eat chapatis?).

So we just need to be strategic and not get carried away in emotions and cut our own legs, with the onset of 2nd and 3rd Generation technologies in ethanol a lot of waste products from agriculture are being converted into biofuels, allowing the farmers to earn money even from what they considered as waste and literally burnt down previously. Bio Gas is another such example of getting waste out wealth and the dependency of "Food" crops for Biofuels is decreasing- will continue to decrease only if it has to succeed.

But whether it is the 1st or 3rd Generation biofuels- they are still a bajillion times better than fossil fuels and this artificial binary created between food and fuel as if both are not intricately interwoven in the same fabric of environment and society is another example of speaking before thinking.

Almost every Biofuels conference I go to I see someone (or several ones) asking about Food Vs Fuel, trying to push this polarized narrative and my mind keeps going back to Yemen where millions of children are on the verge of dying from starvation not because Yemen is using all its grains to produce Biofuels but because of the Saudi Arabia (and others) led war in the country which is funded from your money that you paid to buy Saudi's oil.

How can you reduce such a complex issue (on which our lives depend) to A vs B binary and be proud of it?