It's pretty well impossible to avoid the doom-and-gloom talk about the world food crisis. Poor people are facing the real possibility of starving to death and food riots have broken out in Egypt, Haiti, the Ivory Coast and nearly a dozen other areas. Meanwhile, there isn't a lot of evidence to indicate that governments are making the right moves to reverse actions that have set the global food supply on this destructive path.

In fact, said governments are actually making things worse - much, much, much worse - by increasing biofuel targets despite the havoc alternative fuels such as ethanol are wreaking on grain supplies. Yet despite this fact, the UK recently introduced a new policy mandating that all traditional fuel have 2.5 per cent biofuels added to it, with that number to jump to 5.75 per cent by 2010. However the UK isn't the only country introducing biofuels to motorists; the U.S., Indian, China and Brazil are also working on biofuel targets.

What biofuels do is undeniable: they take food out of the mouths of starving people and divert them to be burned as fuel in the car engines of the world's rich consumers.

They may be fighting words, but some people claim the governments are all but sentencing poor nations to starvation with their aggressive biofuel policies and targets. The vicious circle caused by biofuel production is multi-faceted; there isn't one single aspect that is causing the problem. The production of wheat was put on the back burner in favor of corn and sugar crops, to be diverted to the production of biofuels. Now wheat is in short supply, yet the demand is rapidly increasing for various reasons. The world's population is growing, so there are more mouths to feed. The economic growth in China and India have increased the demand for meat, which in turn requires grain for livestock production.

Of course the situation is made worse due to other factors. The rising cost of fuel is hitting farmers hard because you actually have to put something in a tractor to make it run. A drought in Australia, as well as Southern Africa and parts of the U.S. have devastated crops.

Experts aren't exactly painting a unicorns-and-rainbows picture, but then again, why should they? Gordon Brown, the U.K. prime minister admitted this week that biofuels are playing an integral role in the food crisis. However it was less than two weeks ago that the aforementioned biofuel policy came into effect in that country.

Perhaps the worst part of this is the fact according to recent research, biofuels are likely contributing to the problem of emissions as opposed to helping resolve them. There's a kind of cruel irony in destroying carbon-absorbing forests and grasslands to grow crops that will be used for biofuels.

In other words, it would be better for the climate if we just went back to fossil fuels. Biofuels are not a "necessary but painful" way of saving the climate; they are a calamitous mistake by almost every criterion, whether social, ethical or environmental.

So now with all of that bad news, is there any hope of fixing the problem and minimizing the current and future toll biofuel production will take on both the earth and the people who live here?

There is no simple solution. Much of the increased biofuel demand comes from the US, where Democratic and Republican politicians alike have talked themselves into a dead-end search for "energy security" - with US-grown corn top of the list.

But the UK and the EU can reverse some of the damage by immediately ditching their own biofuels policies and providing vital aid funding, principally through the WFP, to help prevent widespread starvation in the short term. Politicians need to realise that there is no such thing as "sustainable biofuels", either now or in the future. As for investors, they need to realise that pouring money into biofuels is a bad bet: subsidies will be quickly withdrawn when policymakers face up to the reality of their ghastly error.

In the meantime, millions face starvation and death from increasing hunger and malnutrition. There is no time to lose.

» New Statesman