A report suggests that growing crops for biofuels is hurting the environment and adding to the global food crisis.

Tim Searchinger and Ralph Heimlich write in the ninth installment of Creating a Sustainable Food Future that the vast majority of biofuel projects backed by the U.S. and the European Union are counterproductive, bumping up food prices, reducing land to grow food crops and doing little to combat global warming.

The report also finds that many of the calculations used to surmise bioenergy’s ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are not correct because they do not take into account the carbon dioxide generated by burning the crops.

“In fact, burning biomass emits at least a little more carbon dioxide than fossil fuels for the same amount of generated energy,” the report says.

Fast-growing sugar cane in the tropics and maize in the U.S. are two examples of the inefficiency of crops being grown for biofuels, the report stated.

“I would say that many of the claims for biofuels have been dramatically exaggerated,” the World Resources Institute’s President Andrew Steer told The New York Times. “There are other, more effective routes to get to a low-carbon world.” The Institute published the report at the end of January.

The report suggests that other options should be pursued, like solar photovoltaic systems, in lieu of biofuels.

“On three-quarters of the world’s land, (these) systems today can generate more than 100 times the useable energy per hectare than bioenergy is likely to produce in the future, even using optimistic assumptions,” the report mentioned.

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