Maputo — The claim that biofuels are a threat to food security comes from multinational oil companies, who fear that biofuels are a threat to their business, alleged Jose Bellini, coordinator for agrobusiness of the Brazilian Agriculture and Livestock Research company, EMBRAPA, in Maputo on Thursday.

Ballini was speaking during a seminar on biofuels, organized by the Mozambican Investment Promotion Centre (CIP).

"At root, from my point of view, this is a question of the oil companies, who have strong lobbies across the world, because the consumption of biofuels will reduce the consumption of fossil fuels", he said. "'If we cease being dependent on fossil fuels, we will not allow the prices to be manipulated as they would like, and so this whole debate comes down to economic issues".

Bellini said that the massive planting of sugar cane for biofuels in Brazil has not affected food production. On the contrary, Brazil now produces twice as much grain as it did 20 years ago.

Asked about the drastic increase of the price of food in Brazil in 2008, Bellini said that this had nothing to do with biofuels. "The increase in food prices on the international market can be explained by the increase in the price of other inputs used in agriculture, and not by the fact that land is being used to produce biofuels", he said.

He pointed out that Brazil has currently about 400 million hectares of arable land, of which only eight million hectares are being used to produce ethanol. "That means that only two per cent of the arable land is being used to produce ethanol", he said.

He said that much of Brazil's arable land is used for cattle. Currently Brazil has about 183 million head of cattle, each using about one hectare, from which one can conclude that cattle use almost half the country's arable land.

"If we reduced by just ten per cent the area occupied by cattle, in order to make better use of arable land, it would be possible to triple the area available for ethanol production", Bellini argued.

He also mentioned the use of new technologies to produce sugar cane, which boost productivity, so that more ethanol can be produced without occupying more land. "Food production does not only depend on the available land, but on technologies and a number of factors that allow increased productivity", he said.

Bellini did, however, think it legitimate to criticize the United States which is subsidizing farmers to turn maize into ethanol. "The United States is using a human or animal food to produce ethanol", he said. "But from sugar cane the only things you can produce are sugar or ethanol. You can't turn sugar cane into food".

Commenting on the case of Mozambique, Bellini said that it is possible to quadruple the area intended for the production of ethanol, because the country is not using even a tenth of the arable land available for food production. For Mozambique, the great advantage of biofuels would be to reduce the country's enormous dependence on imported fossil fuels.

Bellini said that Brazil still uses fossil fuels, but has greatly reduced its dependence. "When the oil shock began in 1975, we were highly dependent on oil", he said. "But today we export oil, because we have reduced our domestic consumption. That improves our energy balance and the balance of trade. That is the main gain".