[Peakoil-announce] Biofuels: Policies on Price and Food Crisis in EU

[Alex Pollard]

A coming event:

Tuesday 29 May 2012 11.00am – 12.30pm

Professor Karel Janda, University of Economics, Prague & Charles
University, Prague.

ANU Centre for European Studies, 1 Liversidge St Canberra

Registration required by Monday 28 May 2012
(It isn't on the ANU online calendar, email europe at anu.edu.au)

Throughout millennia, agriculture provided most of the fuel for vehicular
transportation. The discovery of the internal combustion engine and the
use of oil derivatives for vehicular fuel, led to an increased reliance on
fossil fuels for transportation energy in the 20th century. However,
concerns about availability of fuels, balance of trade and climate change
led to the introduction of biofuel programs in EU and other countries. We
will discuss the impacts of these programs and the relationship between
food and fuel markets. We will show that biofuels have not been the most
dominant contributor to the recent food crisis and that different biofuels
have different impacts on food and energy security and environment.
Professor Karel Janda is a visiting fellow at ANU Centre for European
Studies and Research School of Economics. He is a Professor of finance at
Department of Banking and Insurance, Faculty of Finance and Accounting,
University of Economics, Prague and a holder of RWE-Transgas Group chair
in Economics and Chairman of Department of Microeconomics and Mathematical
Methods, Institute of Economic Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences,
Charles University in Prague. He is an Affiliate Fellow at CERGE-EI, a
joint workplace of Charles University in Prague and the Economics
Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. In the past he
worked for ten years at Research Institute of Agricultural Economics of
the Czech Ministry of Agriculture and he worked as an expert for United
Nations Development Programme in various countries of Eastern Europe and
Central Asia.
ANUCES is an initiative involving four ANU Colleges (Arts and Social
Sciences, Law, Business and Economics, and Asia and the Pacific) co-funded
by the ANU and the European Union.