Abstract
Large-scale deployment of biofuels has a profound effect on allocation of land resources. The expansion of biofuels industry requires a greater amount of crop lands for producing biofuel feedstocks. This additional crop lands could be supplied through (1) reallocation of existing crop lands from other crops (e.g., rice, fruits and vegetables, tobacco, cotton) towards production of biofuel feedstocks (e.g., corn, sugarcane, jatropha, rapeseed), (2) conversion of forest and pasture lands to crop lands. The land-use change thus occurs directly and indirectly. For example, when forest land is converted to produce sugarcane, such conversion is termed as direct land-use change. When biofuels displace existing crop lands in one part of the world, and production of food crops increases in other parts of the world (e.g., by converting forest lands to crop lands), this conversion is termed as indirect land-use change.
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Notes
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A module that can represent both conventional and unconventional oil and gas reserves and production would be ideal; however, the model used here does not have that capacity. Hence, we used energy price forecasts from other sources instead of generating them endogenously in the baseline.
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Steinbuks, J., Timilsina, G.R. (2014). Land-Use Change and Food Supply. In: Timilsina, G., Zilberman, D. (eds) The Impacts of Biofuels on the Economy, Environment, and Poverty. Natural Resource Management and Policy, vol 41. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0518-8_7
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