Glad you blogged this - I'd missed the article.

"it'll be the same farming lobby growing it that also quite happily gets the US government to buy its surplus crop and ship it to developing countries, buggering up their local markets in the process"

A bit of a digression here, because I'm going through an agrarian phase... This so-called "farming lobby" is no such thing, it's an agri-business lobby. Here's Whittaker Chambers (these agrarians have awesome names!):

"A farmer is not everyone who farms. A farmer is the man who, in a ploughed field, stoops without thinking to let its soil run through his fingers, to try its tilth. A farmer is always half buried in his soil. The farmer who is not is not a farmer; he is a businessman who farms. But the farmer who is completes the arc between the soil and God and joins their mighty impulses. We believe that laborare est orare—to labor is to pray. In that sense, the farm is our witness. It is a witness against the world. By deliberately choosing this life of hardship and immense satisfaction, we say in effect: The modern world has nothing better than this to give us. Its vision of comfort without effort, pleasure without the pain of creation, life sterilized against even the thought of death, rationalized so that every intrusion of mystery is felt as a betrayal of the mind, life mechanized and standardized—that is not for us. We do not believe that it makes for happiness from day to day. We fear that it means catastrophe in the end."

See also Wendell Berry or Lee Hoinacki, among others...

In fact, this does route (root!) back to climate change, via a post from Adrian Hon that Paul flagged up earlier this week and an article from Graham Harvey (who I guess is as close as you get to an English agrarian).

The research paper that Hon is writing about calculates that British lamb has four times the carbon footprint of New Zealand lamb, even taking into account the emissions generated by transporting it around the world, while UK milk solids have double the footprint of their NZ equivalent. Hon's (valid) point is that "food miles" are an unreliable gauge of actual carbon footprint.

However, the hidden story here is another impact of agri-business. Besides leading to dumping on poor countries, the subsidised over-production of grain has (according to Harvey) led in the UK to a transformation of pastoral farming. Livestock which would ordinarily graze on open fields are reared instead in sheds and fed on grain (half of Europe's total output is used as animal feed). Besides the animal welfare issues, this greatly increases the carbon footprint. In other words, contrary to the New York Times op-ed piece that Hon quotes, it isn't "poorer British pastures" that "force farmers to use feed", but the Common Agricultural Policy.

Now, I'm taking Harvey's word for this - and he clearly has his own axes to grind. But the more I read about farming and agri-business, the more I want to learn about this - it's such a vital area, so fraught with claim and counter-claim, and so taken for granted by society at large.

Oh, and I'm sure you're right about energy security being the real drive behind the biofuel boom. We're sleepwalking into the end of the world as we know it - and even those leaders who talk about climate change and energy security are only whispering lullabies in our ears.