It's interesting in a twisted sort of way how fads arise and persist for a while until the obvious finally penetrates the fevered brains of victims.

. . . the biofuel genie is out of the bottle and he’s here to stay.

As a society’s wealth increases, its energy consumption rises far more quickly than its food consumption - in fact, food consumption eventually plateaus because people can only fit so much into their stomachs. This very fact is leading to a revolution — the result of which will be that, in the future, we will view fuel as a more important outcome from growing crops than food.

This is complete nonsense that results from confusing energy with liquid fuel for transportation. A society could become filthy rich and need no liquid fuel but it would still need a great deal of energy. The idea of growing crops for liquid fuel is silly at every level. A solar cell, even at our current low level of development, is over 10 times better at collecting solar radiation and doesn't need all of the labor, inputs and processing to yield usable energy.

So, if biofuels are here to stay, how can the global community prevent millions of people from falling into famine due to competition of food land with biofuel land when biofuel land turns out to be more profitable?

Biofuels are not more profitable, they are massively subsidized directly and indirectly. An individual grower may make more profits producing biomass for biofuel, but only because he is farming the government rather than the land. The competition between food and fuel is contrived, created by politicians.

Several ideas were floated, but the most agreed upon solution was that crop yields need to be drastically improved to pack more food value into the same amount of land — otherwise, the amount of crop land needed to feed the world will lead to an environmental catastrophe of its own.

This is true no matter what. It is a threat that existed before the biofuel fad and that will persist even if the world comes to its senses about burning food for transportation.

The argument came down to a major difference between those that think the only answer is to genetically engineer our way out of the problem and those that think the simpler and better solution would be to provide farmers with the education, equipment and strategies to bring their currently low yields up to the maximum yield possible without spending huge amounts of resources on research into genetic modification.

This is not a simpler solution. No one who knows anything about agronomy or human societies could glibly say that all we have to do is somehow raise the whole world to the level of the most developed parts of the world. It's not just a matter of whispering some clues to ignorant peasants, it's socio-cultural transformation on a massive scale along with hugely expensive and time consuming changes to infrastructure, legal systems and internal institutions. Developing engineered crops is child's play by comparison.

The trick, the non-GMO group says, will be to simultaneously increase yield and reduce the environmental impact of farming. It’s very easy to increase one at the expense of the other, but turns out to be very hard to find ways to do both together — and without a huge diversion of money from the current glut the biotech industry is receiving to more traditional sorts of agricultural research, that goal may be damn near impossible to reach.

This is the real conflict. Rent seekers are squabbling about rents from the government. Their arguments are nonsensical but that's OK since the only objective is to convince bureaucrats. They will never be held accountable for results.

The final point that all participants agreed on was that our current funding portfolio will not get us there. There has got to be a global concerted effort by all economic superpowers to increase yield and reduce competition between biofuels and food by funding research that has, for a long time, been virtually ignored.

Rent. That's the only point. Biofuels are a fad, a bubble that must burst since the fundamentals are wrong. They can't produce useful volumes of liquid fuel, and exacerbate the existing problem of food and fiber production on an inadequate and degrading land base.

There are more promising approaches. Efforts to engineer organisms that can mine the atmosphere rather than the soil to produce liquid fuels are better solutions. Developing a better way to transport ourselves than burning liquid fuels is another.