Thursday, May 14, 2009

World- Oil majors invest in bio-fuels

A review by international auditor KPMG has found that 14 large oil companies have begun to invest in renewable energy, and while the top picks are solar and wind energy, biomass and bio-fuels have attracted the interest of most of the companies in the survey, ADP News reports.

A KMPG partner said bio-fuels are seen as the logical and natural extension of the traditional oil companies, although noting that the weight of alternative energy diversification is still insignificant in financial terms.

It could take more than seven years for sales of cars to return to 2007 levels of 69 million units, the president-executive of Nissan said, Reuters reports. He said the credit crisis and currency volatility are worsening the impact of the recession.

World food production needs to double in the next four decades to head off mass hunger, the head of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation said on Monday at the start of a two-day international conference in Madrid, AFP reports. He said the credit crunch, combined with lower prices for farm goods, could lead to a drop in investments in the agriculture sector which would threaten further FAO's goal to halve the number of people who live in hunger by 2015.

Separately, a report by the British international affairs think-tank Chatham House says that recent falls in food prices are a temporary reprieve and are set to resume their upward trend once the world emerges from the economic downturn, M2 Presswire reports. The report, called ‘The Feeding of the Nine Billion: Global Food Security for the 21st Century’ says food supply will have to grow by 50% by 2030 to meet projected demand but climate change, water scarcity and competition for land will make it much harder to achieve. (26 January 2009)

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