Simply put, yes, there is, but only if sufficient agricultural opportunities are considered and utilized correctly.
Moreover, agricultural bioenergy is also attainable and applicable if feed and food production in agriculture is given ample consideration by authorities and experts, as well as bio-based and bioenergy products.
In fact, competence and significant knowledge are readily available for authorities to govern the expansion of bioenergy in agriculture and to grab opportunities and minimize risks of disadvantages.
To clarify, biofuels produced from non-edible versus edible feedstocks are bioenergy options that are neither bad nor good.
In this case, support packages and guidelines for practitioners and governments already exist. These demonstrate several practical methods to produce sustainable feed, biofuel demand, and food in the future.
Some examples of these are:
- Encourage widespread optimization of new farming techniques.
- Secure farmers’ land tenure can provide them financial benefits that they can use to manage and maintain their lands for increased yields and sustain soil productivity.
- Establish local-level healthy management practices for growing and nurturing fuel and food crops that are high-yielding. After all, these crops should grow in different climates and soils.
- Sustain landscape planning and intensification to make lands available for extra production while improving ecosystem services.
- Identify places that are suited for the production of bioenergy through inclusive processes of multi-stakeholder.
- Integrate systems that can produce bio-based products such as bioenergy feedstocks, feed, and food, as these bio-based products should be produced in the same area. They will also improve biodiversity and alleviate the impacts of land use, such as surface waters eutrophication linked to excessive fertilization, salinization, soil compaction, and soil erosion.
- Use organic residues in healthier soil conditions.
- Minimize food chain losses so that there will be lesser land pressure. Losses in food chain systems can be reduced by encouraging healthier harvesting strategies, investing in good refrigeration and storage facilities, spreading awareness among consumers to match groceries according to their necessities only, changing food labels so that these food products will not be prematurely discarded, offering discounts to imperfect food products to promote their sale, and developing transportation structures to promote safety in delivering food products to markets.