It is about a year since I first got involved with Avaaz.org, when I signed one of their petitions about Zimbabwe. Avaaz.org is an international campaigning group working for

stronger protections for the environment, greater respect for human rights, and concerted efforts to end poverty, corruption and war.

I have signed several of Avaaz.org’s petitions. I don’t support all their campaigns, and I think that some of you my readers might not support some of the ones I support, especially related to climate change. But I would expect all of you, at least all who call yourselves Christians, to get behind the one for I have just received an e-mail, with the subject line

Biofuels: the fake climate change solution

Whatever your overall view on global warming issues, you should be concerned about rising food prices for the poor (and perhaps for yourselves!). So please join me in expressing your support for this campaign, through the main link for this campaign and in other ways.

By following that link you will find a summary of the issues. But oddly enough I can’t find online the text of the e-mail I received, although it is publicly available and not copyrighted. Also posting the text including the footnotes is the only way that I can link to the sources Avaaz.org quotes, which demonstrate that there is real research behind this campaign. So here is the whole message, except for the sidebar and the end matter (also I have replaced the visible URLs in some links with the word “link”, they should still work as links):

Dear friends,

Each day, 820 million people in the developing world do not have enough food to eat¹. Food prices around the world are shooting up, sparking food riots from Mexico² to Morocco³. And the World Food Program warned last week that rapidly rising costs are endangering emergency food supplies for the world’s worst-off⁴.

How are the wealthiest countries responding? They’re burning food.

Specifically, they’re using more and more biofuels–alcohol made from plant products, used in place of petrol to fuel cars. Biofuels are billed as a way to slow down climate change. But in reality, because so much land is being cleared to grow them, most biofuels today are causing more global warming emissions than they prevent⁵, even as they push the price of corn, wheat, and other foods out of reach for millions of people⁶.

Not all biofuels are bad–but without tough global standards, the biofuels boom will further undermine food security and worsen global warming. Click here to use our simple tool to send a message to your head of state before this weekend’s global summit on climate change in Chiba, Japan, and help build a global call for biofuels regulation:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/biofuel_standards_now/9.php?cl=60261136

Sometimes the trade-off is stark: filling the tank of an SUV with ethanol requires enough corn to feed a person for a year⁷. But not all biofuels are bad; making ethanol from Brazilian sugar cane is vastly more efficient than US-grown corn, for example, and green technology for making fuel from waste is improving rapidly.

The problem is that the EU and the US have set targets for increasing the use of biofuels without sorting the good from the bad. As a result, rainforests are being cleared in Indonesia to grow palm oil for European biodiesel refineries, and global grain reserves are running dangerously low. Meanwhile, rich-country politicians can look “green” without asking their citizens to conserve energy, and agribusiness giants are cashing in. And if nothing changes, the situation will only get worse.

What’s needed are strong global standards that encourage better biofuels and shut down the trade in bad ones. Such standards are under development by a number of coalitions⁸, but they will only become mandatory if there’s a big enough public outcry. It’s time to move: this Friday through Saturday, the twenty countries with the biggest economies, responsible for more than 75% of the world’s carbon emissions⁹, will meet in Chiba, Japan to begin the G8’s climate change discussions. Before the summit, let’s raise a global cry for change on biofuels:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/biofuel_standards_now/9.php?cl=60261136

A call for change before this week’s summit won’t end the food crisis, or stop global warming. But it’s a critical first step. By confronting false solutions and demanding real ones, we can show our leaders that we want to do the right thing, not the easy thing.

As Kate, an Avaaz member in Colorado, wrote about biofuels, “Turning food into oil when people are already starving? My car isn’t more important than someone’s hungry child.”

It’s time to put the life of our fellow people, and our planet, above the politics and profits that too often drive international decision-making. This will be a long fight. But it’s one that we join eagerly–because the stakes are too high to do anything else.

With hope,

Ben, Ricken, Iain, Galit, Paul, Graziela, Pascal, Esra’a, Milena — the Avaaz.org team

SOURCES:

[1] World Food Programme. “Hunger Facts.” Accessed 10 March 2008. link

[2] The Sunday Herald (Scotland). “2008: The year of global food crisis.” 9 March 2008. link

[3] The Australian: “Biofuels threaten ‘billions of lives'” 28 February, 2008. link

[4] AFP: “WFP chief warns EU about biofuels.” 7 March 2008. link

[5] New York Times: “Biofuels Deemed a Greenhouse Threat.” 8 February 2008. link

[6] The Times: “Rush for biofuels threatens starvation on a global scale.” 7 March 2008. link … also see BBC: “In graphics: World warned on food price spiral.” 10 March 2008. link

[7] The Economist: “The end of cheap food.” 6 December 2007. link

[8] See link, link, and link.

[9] Government of Japan. “Percentage of global carbon dioxide emissions (FY 2003) contributed by G20 nations.” link