Yes, and?

Agricultural practices are bad enough for the environment, for food. Remember DDT? Many pesticides are banned for use in the US. But they are allowed to continue manufacturing and exporting them to other countries.
Crops for biofuels will most probably be grown with whatever they can get their hands on. It all ends up in the water, killing life.

Let's not forget the manufacturers and dealers of those behemoths that spread the chemicals, till the soil, plant the GM seeds and harvest the crops - all the while burning more fossil fuel, adding a prodigious amount of CO2 to the atmosphere.

Let the good times roll.

A lack of liquid fuels is the most lethal thing currently raging over the planet. It is already killing millions of people.

So what exactly is the problem? Do you like dead poor people perhaps?

Pesticides are very good for people: they allow people to live. Bio-pesitices are welcome too, as long as they're not too expensive.

If we want to preserve a healthy environment in the few untouched parts of this world, we must first allow the people who live there to use dirty old synthetic pesticides. That will allow them to grow more food and fuels and to crawl out of poverty. If they don't do this, the environment is ruined for sure.

You can only reduce the ultra-high fertility rates in Central-Africa (7 children per women), with pesticides and fertilizers. Without them, the population explosion continues, and the environment will be wrecked even further.

The best thing for the environment is fewer people. And you get there with pesticides and fertilizers (look at the EU - its wealth, accumulated by industrialisation and modernism - has led to a decline in people - the most important factor in sustainability).

By the way, the UN's very own Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO) today came out to reject Mr Zieglers shallow assessment on biofuels.

Instead, the FAO says: biofuels offer the best opportunity for rural development and poverty alleviation in decades. Without biofuels, a catastrophe brought by high energy prices and underdevelopment, will certainly occur.

   If there is anything that should be done locally and not globally, it might be biofuels (smile).  Jonas is mis-stating the problem and the solution.  Access to fuels is a major problem for the poor.  The question is what type of solution will let them escape poverty and develop a decent standard of living.

   Using their land to produce biofuel for a global market is NOT a solution.  Rather than saving lives, it will kill the millions that Jonas is talking about when a few local landlords switch from edible food crops to fuel for European and American power.

   OTH, locally, creating some fuel from biological sources is a key to escaping poverty, since it can free people from expensive imported fuel sources (oil, for example).  But this does not mean chopping down the forests.  

   Rather it means providing access to technology that can turn waste biological matter (such as sewage) from problems into beneficial sources of both fuel (methane) and fertilizer.

   I have seen the price of no-flush toilets listed as forty dollars US.  A sum totally out of reach for the worlds global poor.  But imagine if the developed nations split say, 40 billion dollars between them to provide these gratis to the worlds rural poor.   A pittance for them, invaluable aid.

   This would be a useful thing to do, and would marry environmentalism to development.

patrick in beijing