Second-generation biofuels refer to biofuels made from cereal-based crops, essentially from corn for ethanol and some wheat, mostly canola, for biodiesel.
The problem has come because the supports to the biofuel industry were envisioned originally as a climate change measure, as a way to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, because when you burn ethanol or biodiesel it releases fewer emissions into the atmosphere than when you burn gasoline or fossil fuel diesel.
The problem is when you take the whole life cycle of the production it produces more greenhouse gas emissions, according to the latest science, because of the way we grow corn.
The real problem for Oxfam, though, comes on the food side, because in Canada we burn.... I did the calculation recently, and it is astounding how much corn we turn into ethanol every year. It's about four billion kilos of corn. I say kilos rather than tonnes because that's what people eat. If it were emergency rations, we would be feeding over three million people for a whole year on what we burn in that year in our cars.
It doesn't make sense to us. It does contribute to the rising food prices we've experienced around the world and the rise in hunger that has been consequent to that rise in food prices. Nearly a billion people in the world are hungry today, chronically undernourished, looking for their next meal and not knowing where they're going to get it.
That we're taking all that food and using it in our cars doesn't make the best sense to us. We think perhaps we should re-examine and redirect those subsidies and the mandate toward third-generation biofuels or solar or wind or other renewable sources.