The huge growth in biofuel inevitably contributed to a reduction in food and an increase in food prices: a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian found that biofuels had forced global food prices up by 75 percent. The results of the price hike were devastating. After food prices first spiked in 2008, the UN special envoy for the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, declared that a “silent tsunami” had pushed a hundred million people into poverty and thirty million into hunger.
