The Center on Food Security and the Environment is a joint effort of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
Biofuels are a hot topic in both the academic literature and the popular press. Much of the current debate over biofuels, however, is devoted to narrow issues of energy conversion to the exclusion of understanding the broader implications surrounding their rapid development. This project embraces these larger questions, examining the role of biofuels development on global land use change and climate, on food markets, and on global food security. Primary questions include:
To quantify these effects, our work is globally oriented, with models of world commodity markets as well as country models and case studies in China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Senegal, and Mozambique.