UK — When energy supplies are disrupted, governments have little choice but to move fast. …Biofuels can offer an immediate, homegrown answer. But without strong safeguards and global policy coordination, rapid expansion of mandates can encourage the clearing of more forests, create more pressure on farmland and divert crops from food markets, raising prices and leaving some communities struggling to afford to eat. Those kinds of trade-offs do not mean we have solved energy insecurity but merely shifted the cost somewhere else — often onto the people and places with the least power to absorb it. This is what makes the warning at the heart of a new paper so urgent. The report, developed through a partnership between Chatham House and the Forest Stewardship Council, estimates that policy changes introduced in response to the Mideast Gulf energy crisis could drive a 70% increase in global biofuel production by 2030 and require an additional 36 million hectares of land for feedstocks.