Should Bio Fuel Imports Be Criminalised?

Did you know Indonesia has higher Net carbon emissions than the U.S?
info.moneyweek.com...
Apparently it’s because within 15 years 90% of their forest will be burnt, and apparently the primary reason for the resent acceleration is farmers planting bio-fuels.

How crazy is that?
Millions of years worth evolution exchanged by mankind for their burning, in order access their “eco-friendly” fuel growth space, which then rapidly depreciate into dessert land.

So should the West simply ban (almost all) bio-fuel imports and focus on using its own land instead?

My Argument…
I can agree with bio-fuels on one condition…
Every year Europe and America produce a surplus of agricultural goods. Once upon a time this was destroyed (through government subsides)…
Europe:

www.kiteblue.net... Thirdly CAP pays farmers to destroy food they are given subsidies to grow

www.openeurope.org.uk... “At the end of the 2006 public storage financial year (30 September 2006), EU public stocks were 13,476,812 tonnes of cereal, rice, sugar and milk products and 3,529,002 hectolitres of alcohol/wine.”

In America It used to destroy food with federal funds but now instead prefers to export it to third world.
As a consequence sometimes this causes poverty by suppressing local agricultural markets, findarticles.com... but on the upside it reduces the destruction of the environment that would happen if people produced their own food by tapping into their nations currently unused “agricultural resources”.

So my solution…
1. Reduce exports to the third world, but not so much as to cause an environmental crisis. I.e. continue (if possible) flooding the markets in the areas where this would most severely occur.
2. Convert the (remaining) current U.S-European surplus into bio fuel.

This is not a good solution, just an improvement to the status quo…

Theoretically we shouldn’t be producing a food surplus at all. Instead we should reduce it by planting more trees on suitable agricultural land. Methods…
1. The market will determine which land is suitable, and all the government need to do is put less emphasis on subsidising cereal crops, and more on tree planting…
2. Or (alternatively) keep cereal crop subsidies roughly the same, but create new fairly well funded subsidies for turning agricultural land to timber.

3. Of course you could just cut almost all agricultural subsidies, the market would then freely determine whether or not (in light of this) it makes economic sense to plant trees on the poorer yield producing cereal crop land.
This saves money, and if too much land is turned to grazing then you can use the tax system to penalise converting land to this practice (and make money).
Apparently just abolishing agricultural subsidies would save the U.S economy 150 billion dollars a year impudent.blognation.us... against a total agricultural economy worth 128 billion dollars a year.

The trouble is the farmers would kill you at the next election, as I understand pigs and sheep determine many of Americas “swing states”. So in order not to offend the cattle I would recommend Method 2 instead. Because under this plan farmers will continue to receive the same number of taxpayers dollars as before (that’s if they do not change) but slightly more taxpayers dollars if they happen to posses land more adequate for forestry. This way they’ll still like your political party, even though at the same time Mother Earth gets saved.

I would agree with critics that it’s only an ideal solution because we do not live in an ideal world. Method 3 would be better for the American people, but moves into a separate argument rooted in how the ratio of certain States seats, doesn’t compare with other States populations.

So what do you think ATS? Should third world bio-fuel imports be banned?
And does anyone else have any ideas (or methodologically) for reducing our agricultural surplus? Or what do you make of what I put forward?

[edit on 090705 by Liberal1984]