An interesting chart from OECD-FAO agriculture outlook 2024-2033 is shown above. This gives a nice picture of the global food context, with a projection in 2033 of the use of grains & oilseeds. Some comments I had:

• Food is ~38% of all grains & oilseed used, slightly less than feed which is ~40%. biofuel is just a ~ 7%. (*). Instead of a ´food versus fuel’ dilemna, why not a ‘feed versus fuel’? (**)
  
• ~ 15% of cereales and oilseed are traded internationally (except soybean with ~40%!). Assuming significant improvement in domestic production and industry adaptation for the net importers, some significant effort to reduce the ~5% of production loss during transport/processing, I can’t help but think that international trade flow may become minimal at some point, or be on shorter distance maybe. The outlook is however unequivocal: +16% of export by 2033.

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Data source:

– main chart below here. Oilseed data have been added “manually” in green, using data from there.
– Note that no ‘advanced biofuels’ are considered here. They are either ‘non-food’ or cover crops, thus do not use more land. Consider an ~ +42% when taking into account advanced biofuels, based on data projected for 2030 according to the IEA biofuel overview.
– International trade, here and here, a nice visualization there.

(*): the fool/oil price correlation probably not due to a land use competition (as said here) looking at such chart, but a consequence of the dependency on oil in today’s agricultural industry, see this (in french!)
(**): But the relationship between feed and biofuel is more complex than a pure one-on-one competition. Animal feed can be the cereal itself, or a byproduct of the biofuel production.