A few weeks ago, I wondered if biofuels were actually the green mitzvah they were touted to be — an ethical alternative to greenhouse gas-belching fossil fuels — or if they were a mitzvah ha’ba b’aveirah, a “mitzvah” coming out of a sin, the sin of unchecked environmental havoc due to biofuels’ “non-toxic” by-products.

The new waves of global food riots, though, have made me much more concerned, and much more wary of entrenching myself in the pro-biofuel camp.

The 2007 “tortilla riots” in Mexico, where some 75,000 Mexicans protested the rising cost of tortillas in Mexico City, followed an astronomical increase in the price of corn — some 400% in a three month span. The cause for the price hike lay north of the border, farmers planting “industrial corn” to be processed into ethanol, replacing the lower-priced food staple relied upon by millions of Mexicans.

Cooking oil is also turning into the world’s “other” oil problem. In Mumbai, India, residents are forced “to ration every drop” of cooking oil, with the price of palm oil having risen 70 percent in the past year. One store in Chongqing, China saw three people killed in a stampede when it offered a “limited promotion” on cooking oil. Half of the increase in worldwide demand for vegetable oils, the New York Times says, is because of biofuel demand.

There’s a concept in Jewish tradition called mitzva ha’ba b’aveirah, a mitzvah that gets done as the outcome of a sin is rendered invalid. For instance, one may not blow a stolen shofar on Rosh Hashanah, eat stolen matzah on Passover, or light a stolen menorah on Chanukah. The fact that the mitzvah came out of a sin renders it unacceptable to G-d.

While we already know about the impact biofuels are having on food prices, an article in today’s New York Times makes me wonder if the entire positive impact biofuels will have in the near future is rendered a mitzva ha’ba b’aveirah.

Haaretz reports:

Haredi greens face uphill battle By Yair Ettinger When Yehuda Ganot, an ultra-Orthodox environmentalist, occasionally visits Lithuanian community elder Rabbi Aharon Yehuda Leib Shteinman, he hears the recurrent phrase: “Sit, study, give up that nonsense.” Ultra-Orthodox environmental activists say they are often asked if trees are more important to them than education. Ganot, who chairs Haredim for the Environment, is among those fighting to put the subject on the agenda.