While I'm not particularly for or against biofuels (I'm more "for" them if they aren't made out of food), I'm really tired of them being the scapegoat for rising food prices, because it so effectively distracts from the real issues.
If we had no biofuel production AT ALL, food prices would still be rising and food shortages and riots would still be happening because the system itself is broken. In fact, ethanol production (the only biofuel Western powers have really embraced) has not cut grain production in the U.S. one bit, the amount of grain NOT USED for ethanol has actually increased over the past 3 years:
American Fuels: Is ethanol taking food out of peoples mouths?
Which should make it obvious to anyone that there is no actual shortage of food, there is, in fact, plenty of it. The real problem which the noise machine is furiously distracting us from by this constant mantra of blaming biofuels first and foremost--is the distribution of those grains in a global food market that has meant the destruction of local food economies everywhere, including the West to a lesser degree. For example, Haiti:
Thirty years ago, Haiti raised nearly all the rice it needed. What happened?
Bill Quigley: The U.S. Role in Haiti's Food Riots
And the reason why there is so much distraction from this issue especially in the West is that if you connect the dots, it's pretty easy to see how poor nations' economies and food supplies have been destroyed over the past 30 years but also why real wages for the average person in the West haven't increased in those same 30 years, and why small farmers in the West have been dying out for the last 30 years--you can't actually compete fairly in a global economy with slave labor, huge agribusinesses, and loan-shark-like bodies like the IMF and World Bank keeping poor nations in a headlock so that a few multinational corporations and investors become obscenely wealthy while 99.85% of people lose on a sliding scale from something to everything.
The real shame of this distraction is to not see how the plight of Haiti is intimately connected to our own economic plight here in the West, because then people in the West might actually care a little bit more than offhandedly saying, "let them eat our cheap grain," and perhaps might see that a global fight for economic justice concerns them, too.