A/HRC/9/23 page 43 10. The development of international trade in agrofuels will therefore further aggravate the current situation in which, due to the significant purchasing power of consumers in industrialized countries, a competition will emerge between the production of food for local consumption in developing countries and the production of feedstock for transport and other uses in industrialized countries. This is not a new phenomenon, of course: it is one which is linked to the problem of cash crops in general, understood as crops which are exported instead of being consumed in the country in which they are grown, and the production of feedstock for fuel presents a certain analogy in this respect with the production of feed for livestock, in order to meet primarily the demand for dairy food and meat in industrialized countries. What is unique however about the demand for crops for fuel production is that this demand is much more sensitive to price changes than demand for crops for food: while the level of consumption of calories and even the composition of diets vary only to a small extent when prices change households usually cut down on education or other non-vital items before limiting their consumption of food -, the demand for fuel is much more elastic, although it is driven both by the price of oil (with which agrofuels compete) and by the price of crops. This means that the volatility of the international markets for agrofuels may be particularly high. Even more importantly, the demand for agrofuels is potentially almost infinite. Whereas increased demand for crops for food or in order to feed livestock reaches a natural limit - the demand is saturated at a certain level -, once crops are turned into bioethanol or biodiesel, the level of demand can be such that a very large proportion of crops can be used for that purpose, without a risk of saturation of markets before long. Thus, if the production of agrofuels is to develop in the future, it will be particularly important to monitor the impact on the non-growers of these crops in the producing countries: for even if the crop-growers themselves benefit from producing crops for fuel which they export to foreign markets, the impacts could be negative on those other segments of the local population, whose food security might suffer, for instance as a result of the increased price of land or a diminished availability of food. -----