The Indirect Land Use Impacts of United States Biofuel Policies: The Importance of Acreage, Yield, and Bilateral Trade Responses

Abstract

Recent analysis has highlighted agricultural land conversion as a significant debit in the greenhouse gas accounting of ethanol as an alternative fuel. A controversial element of this debate is the role of crop yield growth as a means of avoiding cropland conversion in the face of biofuels growth. We find that standard assumptions of yield response are unduly restrictive. Furthermore, we identify both the acreage response and bilateral trade specifications as critical considerations for predicting global land use change. Sensitivity analysis reveals that each of these contributes importantly to parametric uncertainty. Copyright 2009, Oxford University Press.

The Global Impacts of Biofuel Mandates

“…This is an area where a great deal of economic research has been undertaken -particularly for corn. Keeney and Hertel (2008) explore this issue in detail, and here we adopt their central case assumption of a long run yield response to output price changes (relative to variable input prices) of 0.4. We follow those authors in calibrating to this parameter by adjusting the elasticity of substitution in crop production to hit this targeted yield response.…”

“…We follow Keeney and Hertel (2008) in allowing the elasticity of crop yields with respect to price to vary from 0.00 to 0.80, with mean 0.40. Lower bounds on the absolute value of the acreage response parameters (elasticities of land transformation) are assumed to be 20% of the mean for both the land cover and harvested crop land elasticities.…”

Production and characterization of cellulolytic enzymes by isolated<br>Klebsiella sp. PRW-1 using agricultural waste biomass

“…The produced biofuels becomes important and promising alternative energy source for fossil fuels to protect the environment and prevents the problem of the pollution (Puppan, 2002). Some recent reports correlated the first-generation biofuels production with food security and market prices of staple food crops such as maize and rice (James et al, 2008;Keeney et al, 2009). Hence it is important to make a fast transition from the firstgeneration to second-generation biofuels production using the lignocellulosic biomass such as agricultural crops residues (Fischer et al, 2009).…”

A field survey on abundance of biofuel plant species in Alur Taluk of Hassan District, Karnataka, India

“…These biofuel plants are planted in waste land and on bunds which will not change the Land use pattern of the location which is reverse as documented by Kim et al (2009) where, the resource material of Biofuels were planted in the cultivable land. Keeney and Hertel (2008) in their indirect land use impacts of US biofuel policies have also indicated the danger of planting the biofuel pants in the cultivable land. Since Alur comes under transitional zone receiving good amount of rainfall (1599.3 mm annually), abundant Honge trees are found in the riverside yielding few seeds, as the trees put forth more of vegetative growth and due to stagnation of water the Neem population is very less.…”