L’impiego di mais per la produzione di bioetanolo per autotrazione : una valutazione dei potenziali impatti sul sistema agroalimentare mondiale

Bio-energies are a very hot topic currently widely discussed at many levels. International organizations, different countries, different political parties together with scientists and economists or simple expert often have opinions which are obviously conflicting. The topic is very hot today because of many different heterogeneous factors. Amongst the most important one we can quote: - the need for a better energy security - needs deriving from the very high price of the oil barrel - programs related to climate changes and efforts to find solutions capable of eliminating or reducing the negative impact of human activity on the planet - the need to stimulate agricultural activities through political actions, in the poorest parts of the world. Within bio-energy sector the segment of bio-fuels represents a potential growth for the demand of many agricultural commodities. Ethanol and bio-diesel, which are respectively the result of starch and sugar cultures and oil-seeds, we present an alternative outcome to what traditionally generated by the above mentioned cultures. The current movements on the prices of the most important raw materials, energy or others, throws the attention to potential risks from the point of view of food security created by the impact of the growth of the demand of energetic products from agriculture. (Schmidhuber, 2007) In this paper we focus on bio-ethanol, the most important bio-fuel use it for transportation in the world. The aim of this paper is to present a critical analysis which can lead to potential solutions to the dilemma on the competition between new utilizations for corn, one of the most important cereals in the world: the growing demand form the energy sector; the most traditional use for feeding humans and animals. The effort is to approach this topic from the production standpoint and to assess the potential of the agricultural sector in comparison with the current and future needs stemming from the energy and the nutritional market. In order to define a situation which is as realistic as possible, I have chosen to focus only on the incremental demand of corn is from its usage in the production of bio-ethanol for transportation. This incremental request its only one of the new demands which the whole global agricultural sector will have to face in the near future before the real possibilities of development of second generation bio-fuels become known. In order to have the correct interpretation of the issues discussed in this paper I inevitably had to make a critical analysis of many papers published on a very debated topic: bio-fuels (Chapter 2). A first top-level analysis shows that there is a big debate in America, particularly in the United States, on bio-fuels. Slightly less than 60% of the scientific papers which I now described have been written in America. More than 80% of these papers present different models used for forecasting and analysis aimed at research. From a purely statistical point of view Europe seems to be lagging behind in the study and assessment of the political and economical impact of bio-fuels. Scientific publications issued in Europe tackle a wide range of different topics. A possible explanation of this fact is the lack of a clear guideline in approaching this topic, both from the scientific and the political communities. Finally, I have taken into account the publications issued by the Supra-national organizations such as FAO, OECD and the European commission. In this case, the topics dealt with are mostly orientated at the study of the potential impact of the development of bio-fuels on local and global economies and on the agricultural sector. The main purpose of these