U.S. President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada are reportedly blocking a British plan to fight food shortages and inflation by cutting back on biofuels in favour of edible crops, claiming it endangers their “net zero” ambitions.
Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a comparatively recent but enthusiastic convert to the cause of the “green agenda”, broke with his usual stance to propose that land currently used to grow so-called green fuels should be repurposed for food production, as shortages of Russian and Ukrainian grain and fertilisers, along with soaring fuel costs, leave much of the world facing exorbitant price rises and even famine.
Johnson is telling counterparts at the G7 summit at a luxury spa retreat in the German Alps that “Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine are creating terrible aftershocks across the world, driving up energy and food prices as millions of people are on the brink of famine,” according to The Telegraph, which is close to Britain’s governing Conservative (Tory) Party.
“Only Putin can end this needless and futile war, but global leaders need to come together and apply their combined economic and political heft to help Ukraine and make life easier for households across the world. Nothing should be off the table.”
However, while Germany’s left-liberal coalition government is said to have backed the plan, officials in the Biden administration have been clear that they will not support its implementation, with Canada’s Justin Trudeau also opposed.
“We should still argue for the right thing. They disagree with it because they are thinking as well about their fuel supply… We think that is misplaced,” said government minister George Eustice of Biden and Trudeau moving to squash the British food plan, in comments to Sky News quoted by The Independent.
Boris Johnson signalled that the United Kingdom may still attempt to implement domestic changes to land use, saying ahead of the crisis that “[f]rom emergency food aid to reviewing our own biofuel use, the UK is playing its part to address this pernicious global crisis,” which he blamed on Russia’s “craven blockade” of the Ukrainian ports from which much grain is typically exported.
The Russian government, for its part, denies responsibility for food shortages, blaming them on Western sanctions limiting supplies from his own country and the Ukrainian mining their own harbours.
Johnson appears to be arguing against the Ukrainians striking a peace deal with Moscow at the G7, telling the BBC: “The point I would make to people is, I think that sometimes the price of freedom is worth paying” — although his country is not actually fighting the war directly.
“And just remember, it took the democracies in the middle of the last century a long time to recognise that they had to resist tyranny and aggression. It took them a long time, it was very expensive, but what it bought in the end, with the defeat of the dictators, particularly of Nazi Germany, it bought decades and decades of stability [and] a world order that relied on a rules-based international system,” he added — somewhat dubiously, considering the end of the Second World War was followed by the onset of the Cold War and multiple proxy conflicts with the Soviet Union and Communist China, the latter of which is more powerful today that at any point in modern history.