Isn’t it wonderful? Bright yellow rape everywhere, juicy corn all the way to the horizon: a new era of agriculture is dawning. It’s not only food growing for humans but rather energy for their automobiles. Our fields provide us with almost any energy form we could think of. Feeling the need to change and knowing that fossil energy will be depleted some time we need to proceed in a new direction.

The German minister of environment just made it clear: until 2020 the percentage of biological fuels should increase to 17%, which would save the atmosphere millions of tons of carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, the minister did not reveal how the remaining 83% fuel should be replaced. Probably he knows that there is simply not enough arable land and that already today, agriculturally generated fuel is putting up our food bills. The result is that Bavarian breweries are already running out of barley and in Mexico prices for corn tortillas are astronomic. Monocultures, needing immense amounts of water, are threatening civilisations: today more than 1,5 billion people do not have access to purified drinking water.