Bart Mongoven surveys the Biofuel Backlash and explains the apparently contradictory relationship between the environmental movement and biofuels. The Western European and American agriculture lobbies provide the most aggressive advocacy for biofuels.

The political support for biofuels already is paying dividends in both Europe and the United States. Corn prices are now more than 40 percent higher than they were a year ago, despite a 15 percent increase in planting. The rising price of corn meant reduced acreage of wheat planting, and this has coincided with a terrible drought in Australia and a falling dollar. As a result, wheat prices have doubled in the past year, to $9 per bushel for the first time ever (more than $10 in France). These are good times for farmers, and ethanol is playing a role in it.

Thus, the largest impediment to growing a global ethanol market may not be technology or economics. The established influence of the ag lobby can be seen everywhere from the $0.53/gal tax on imported ethanol to the subsidies that keep Gap farmers from being able to compete. While tearing these tariffs down might be one of the most effective ways to shrink the Gap, domestic politics make it almost impossible to imagine it happening.

Mongoven concludes by examining Brazil’s example. On face of the issue, it seems that Brazil has demonstrated a way to make ethanol economically competitive with current technology. The continuing export restrictions, however demonstrate that factors beyond climate change and energy security have been driving the biofuel agenda.

Brazil’s problem, then, is that it merely solved the problem politicians talked about — it has developed a fuel that reduces greenhouse gas emissions and comes from a place that is politically stable and friendly to both the European Union and United States. In solving the rhetorical problem without offering a political fix, it has placed U.S. environmental activists and EU politicians in a difficult position, and has not necessarily won markets. The larger problem… is that there is little interest in either the United States or Europe in staring down the agricultural interests.