I don't blame Mo Farah, Pele and Haile Gebrselassie,

　　who lined up, all hugs and smiles, outside Downing Street for a

　　photocall at the prime minister's hunger summit. Perhaps they were

　　unaware of the way in which they were being used to promote David

　　Cameron's corporate and paternalistic approach to overseas aid. Perhaps

　　they were also unaware of the crime against humanity over which he

　　presides. Perhaps Cameron himself is unaware of it.

　　You should by now have heard about the famine developing in the Sahel region of west Africa.

　　Poor harvests and high food prices threaten the lives of some 18

　　million people. The global price of food is likely to rise still

　　further, as a result of low crop yields in the United States, caused by

　　the worst drought in 50 years. World cereal prices, in response to this

　　disaster, climbed 17% last month.

　　We have been cautious about

　　attributing such events to climate change: perhaps too cautious. A new

　　paper by James Hansen, head of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies,

　　shows that there has been a sharp increase in the frequency of

　　extremely hot summers. Between 1951 and 1980 these events affected

　　between 0.1 and 0.2% of the world's land surface each year. Now, on

　　average, they affect 10%. Hansen explains that "the odds that natural

　　variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small".

　　Both the droughts in the Sahel and the US crop failures are likely to be

　　the result of climate change.

　　But this is not the only sense in

　　which the rich world's use of fuel is causing the poor to starve. In the

　　United Kingdom, in the rest of the European Union and in the United

　　States, governments have chosen to deploy a cure as bad as the disease.

　　Despite overwhelming evidence of the harm their policy is causing, none

　　of them will change course.

　　Biofuels are the means by which

　　governments in the rich world avoid hard choices. Rather than raise fuel

　　economy standards as far as technology allows, rather than promoting a

　　shift from driving to public transport, walking and cycling, rather than

　　insisting on better town planning to reduce the need to travel, they

　　have chosen to exchange our wild overconsumption of petroleum for the

　　wild overconsumption of fuel made from crops. No one has to drive less

　　or make a better car: everything remains the same except the source of

　　fuel. The result is a competition between the world's richest and

　　poorest consumers, a contest between overconsumption and survival.

　　There was never any doubt about which side would win.

　　I've

　　been banging on about this since 2004, and everything I warned of then

　　has happened. The US and the European Union have both set targets and

　　created generous financial incentives for the use of biofuels. The

　　results have been a disaster for people and the planet.

　　Already,

　　40% of US corn (maize) production is used to feed cars. The proportion

　　will rise this year as a result of the smaller harvest.

　　Though the

　　market for biodiesel is largely confined to the European Union, it has

　　already captured 7% of the world's output of vegetable oil. The European

　　commission admits that its target (10% of transport fuels by 2020) will

　　raise world cereal prices by between 3% and 6%. Oxfam estimates that

　　with every 1% increase in the price of food, another 16 million people

　　go hungry.

　　By 2021, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and

　　Development says that 14% of the world's maize and other coarse grains,

　　16% of its vegetable oil and 34% of its sugarcane will be used to make

　　people in the gas-guzzling nations feel better about themselves. The

　　demand for biofuel will be met, it reports, partly through an increase

　　in production; partly through a "reduction in human consumption". The

　　poor will starve so that the rich can drive.

　　The rich world's

　　demand for biofuels is already causing a global land grab. ActionAid

　　estimates that European companies have now seized 5m hectares of

　　farmland – an area the size of Denmark – in developing countries for

　　industrial biofuel production. Small farmers, growing food for

　　themselves and local markets, have been thrown off their land and

　　destituted. Tropical forests, savannahs and grasslands have been cleared

　　to plant what the industry still calls "green fuels".

　　When the

　　impacts of land clearance and the use of nitrogen fertilisers are taken

　　into account, biofuels produce more greenhouse gases than fossil

　　fuels do. The UK, which claims that half the biofuel sold here meets its

　　sustainability criteria, solves this problem by excluding the

　　greenhouse gas emissions caused by changes in land use. Its

　　sustainability criteria are, as a result, worthless.

　　Even

　　second-generation biofuels, made from crop wastes or wood, are an

　　environmental disaster, either extending the cultivated area or removing

　　the straw and stovers which protect the soil from erosion and keep

　　carbon and nutrients in the ground. The combination of first- and

　　second-generation biofuels – encouraging farmers to plough up grasslands

　　and to leave the soil bare – and hot summers could create the perfect

　　conditions for a new dust bowl.

　　Our government knows all this. One

　　of its own studies shows that if the European Union stopped producing

　　biofuels, the amount of vegetable oils it exported to world markets

　　would rise by 20% and the amount of wheat by 33%, reducing world prices.

　　Preparing

　　for the prime minister's hunger summit on Sunday, the international

　　development department argued that, with a rising population, "the food

　　production system will need to be radically overhauled, not just to

　　produce more food but to produce it sustainably and fairly to ensure

　　that the poorest people have the access to food that they need". But

　　another government department – transport – boasts on its website that,

　　thanks to its policies, drivers in this country have now used 4.4bn

　　litres of biofuel.

　　Of this 30% was produced from recycled cooking

　　oil. The rest consists of 3bn litres of refined energy snatched from the

　　mouths of the people that Cameron claims to be helping.

　　Some of

　　those to whom the government is now extending its "nutrition

　　interventions" may have been starved by its own policies. In this and

　　other ways, David Cameron, with the unwitting support of various

　　sporting heroes, is offering charity, not justice. And that is no basis

　　for liberating the poor.

　　• For a fully referenced version of this article, visit George Monbiot's website

　　我不会指责法拉赫，贝利，海勒·格布雷希拉希耶，他们一字排开，拥抱微笑着，在唐宁街上，为首相饥饿峰会拍照。可能他们没意识到他们被利用来促进大卫·卡梅伦海外援助的公司和家长式作法。也许卡梅伦本人也没意识到。

　　目前你可能知道了西非Sahel地区饥荒严重了。农作物歉收和高粮食价格威胁到1800万人的生活。因为美国50年一遇的干旱导致的粮食产量偏低，全球粮食价格未来仍会上涨。因为灾害，上个月，全球农作物价格上涨17%。

　　我们一直谨慎地把这类事件归因于气候变化：或许太谨慎了。美国宇航局戈达德太空研究所负责人詹姆斯·汉森新作的一篇论文显示，酷热夏天的频率显著增长了。1951到1980年间，每年这只影响到地球表面的0.1%-0.2%。而现在，平均影响到10%。汉森解释说“自然环境变化造成极端天气的可能性是非常小的，难以察觉”。Sahel地区的干旱和美国的粮食减产都可能是气候变化的结果。

　　但富人世界用燃油不是导致穷人挨饿的唯一原因。在英国，欧盟和美国，政府决定实行的措施就像疾病一样。不顾他们制定的政策造成的有绝对证据的损害，没有一个政府愿意改变。

　　生物燃料是富人世界的政府避免难题的方式。他们不在技术条件允许下提高燃料节约标准，不把开私家车出行方式转移到鼓励公共交通、步行、骑车出行，不坚持更好的规划城镇以减少出行需要，他们选择把对石油的野蛮的过度消耗转移到对农作物的过度消耗。没有人少开车或制造更节能的车：除了能源减少外没有任何改变。这导致了世界上最富和最贫穷的人之间的竞争，过度消费和生存之间的竞争。哪边会赢毫无疑问。

　　我从2004年就开始关注这个问题，我警告的事情后来都发生了。美国和欧盟都设定了目标并为使用生物燃料建立了财政奖励。这个结果对人类和地球来说都是个灾难。

　　目前美国40%的谷物(玉米)已经用来供养汽车了。由于粮食减产今年该比例还会上升。

　　尽管生物燃油的买卖仅限于欧盟内部，但已经占据了世界植物油产量的7%。欧盟委员会承认它的预期目标(到2020年交通燃料的10%)会使全球谷物价格上涨3-6%。牛津救济委员会估计粮食价格每上涨1%，就会有1600万人挨饿。

　　经济合作与发展组织称，到2021，全球14%的玉米和其他谷物，16%的植物油和34%的甘蔗将被用用在油耗上。对生物燃料的需求一部分靠产品的增加;一部分靠“人类消耗的减少”。穷人会挨饿，这样富人才能开车。

　　富人世界对生物燃料的需求已经导致全球开始争夺土地。援助行动组织估计欧洲的公司为了生产工业生物燃料，目前已在发展中国家占据了500万公顷农田——相当于丹麦的国土面积。那些为自己和当地市场生产食物小农们，被剥夺了土地后变得更穷困。热带雨林，热带草原和温带草原被开垦出来种植所谓的“绿色燃料”。

　　把土地开垦和施加氮肥的影响计算在内，生物燃料比矿物燃料制造的温室气体还要多。英国宣称销售的生物燃料的一半就能满足持续性标准，通过减少土地使用变化造成的温室气体排放解决了这个问题。因此它的持续性标准是毫无价值的。

　　即使是从农作物废料和秸秆制造的二代生物燃料，也是环境灾难，不论是扩大耕地面积还是去除能防止水土流失和保存碳和养分的秸秆和杂草。一代和二代生物燃料的组合会促使农民开垦草原，使土壤暴露在外——酷热的夏季会为沙尘暴提供绝佳的环境。

　　我们的政府清楚地知道这点。他们自己的一个研究显示：如果欧盟停止制造生物燃料，它出口到全球市场的植物油会增加20%，谷物33%，能降低全球的价格。

　　为了准备周日举行的首相“饥饿峰会”，国际发展部门称，随着人口的增加，“粮食生产系统需要从根本上进行改革，不仅要生产更多的粮食，而且要能保证最贫穷的人能持续的，公平地得到他们需要的粮食”》。但另一个政府部门——交通部——在网站上称，多亏这个政策，该国的司机们用了44亿升生物燃料。其中30%是从回收的地沟油中提炼的。另外30亿升提炼的燃料是从卡梅伦声称要帮助的那些人口中夺来的。

　　该政策已使一部分政府要扩大“营养干预”的对象忍饥挨饿。通过这个或其他方式，卡梅伦和那些不知不觉支持该政策的，各行的体坛英雄们，在做慈善，而非公正。那不是解决贫穷的根本。