Biofuel

The oil price rise entanglement have cause many people went to look for car fuel for a cheaper price. One of the alternative can be obtained from ethanol, grown on palm oil tree or corn field. In order to obtain them cheaply, the oil gas companies found the solution; by buying them from poor countries. The high market demands for corn oil and palm oil had caused many farmers racing against time to start growing them.

Here's a catch, is there any side effect on this?

Do you know? Country like Mexico depends on corn breads to make their staple food: tortillas. Tortillas to them is like white rice to us Malaysian, if we don't eat them for a week or two, we'll start become crazy, like suicidal case for some.

Image: Mexicans stage tortilla protest

The rise price of corn which now used for the biofuel had caused the poor to rally since they couldn't buy their staple food, which costed them 1/3 of their paycheck. Imagine what will happen if Malaysian couldn't eat white rice anymore?

However, in countries like Indonesia where the palm oil aren't the major problem if the price risen up, have started to grow palm oil in large scale. Studies shown that it caused some effects to the environment. The deforestation caused by burning them down to create space to plant oil palm trees caused CO2 being released. In addition, many wildlife are wiped out due to deforestation as well as weaken the soil. Some survey shows that Indonesia emits the highest amount of CO2 after America and China for deforestation to expand the plantation of palm oil.

Image: Orang utan finds his home destroyed to make palm oil plantation

The use of biofuel certainly caused a number of negative environmental effects as well as indirectly caused the food price rice.