A worker harvests oil-palm fruit in Malaysia. Photograph: EPA/Barbara Walton

The production of biofuels is fuelling poverty, human rights abuses and damage to the environment, Christian Aid warned today.

The charity said huge subsidies and targets in developed countries for boosting the production of fuels from plants such as maize and palm oil are exacerbating environmental and social problems in poor nations.

And rather than being a “silver bullet” to tackle climate change, the carbon emissions of some of the fuels are higher than fossil fuels because of deforestation driven by the need for land for them to grow.

According to a report, Growing Pains, by Christian Aid, industrial scale production of biofuels is worsening problems such as food price hikes in central America, forced displacement of small farmers for plantations and pollution of local water sources.

But with 2.4 billion people worldwide currently without secure sources of energy for cooking and heating, Christian Aid believes the renewable fuels do have the potential to help the poor.

The charity highlights schemes such as the growing of jatropha in Mali, where the plant is raised between food crops and the oil from the seeds is used to run village generators which can power appliances such as stoves and lights.

The report argues that talking about “good” or “bad” biofuels is oversimplifying the situation, and the problem is not with the crop or fuel – but the policies surrounding them.

Developed countries have poured subsidies into biofuel production – for example in the US where between 9.2 billion dollars and 11 billion dollars went to supporting maize-based ethanol in 2008 – when there are cheaper and more effective ways to cut emissions from transport, the report said.

The charity said biofuels production needed a “new vision” – a switch from supplying significant quantities of transport fuel for industrial markets to helping poor people have access to clean energy.

The report’s author Eliot Whittington, climate advocacy specialist for Christian Aid, said: “Vast sums of European and American taxpayers’ money are being used to prop up industries which are fuelling hunger, severe human rights abuses and environmental destruction — and failing to deliver the benefits claimed for them.”

He said the current approach to biofuels had been “disastrous”.

He added: “Christian Aid believes that the best approach to biofuels is to grow them on a small scale and process them locally to provide energy for people in the surrounding countryside. This can also increase rural people’s incomes and has the potential to actually increase soil fertility and moisture retention, without compromising people’s food security.”

The UN has said that billions of dollars will be needed to improve irrigation in Asia. Photograph: Stringer/India/Reuters

Asia faces an unprecedented food crisis and huge social unrest unless hundreds of billions of dollars are invested in better irrigation systems to grow crops for its burgeoning population, according to a UN report published today.

India, China, Pakistan and other large countries avoided famines in the 1970s and 1980s only because they built giant state-sponsored irrigation systems and introduced better seeds and fertilisers. But the extra 1.5 billion people expected to live on the continent by 2050 will double Asia’s demand for food, says the report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Bank-funded International Water Management Institute (IWMI).

A combination of very little new land left for cultivation, an increasingly unpredictable climate and water supplies stretched to the limit means the only realistic option to feed people in the future will be better management of existing water supplies, according to the report.

“There is no new land or water to develop so we have to make more use of what we have. Existing irrigation systems are often 50 to 70 years old. They are leaking and water is evaporating. We urgently need a new generation of irrigation. That is the only way we are going to feed everyone,” said Colin Chartres, who is the director general of IWMI.

“If we don’t [invest] we will see food crises like the one in 2007 repeated over and again. That was an early warning. If nothing is done, you are going to get an increase in social unrest, migration and a fertile ground for terrorism,” he said.

Since the demise of communism and the rise of the free market, farmers have increasingly opted to take irrigation into their own hands, mainly using cheap Chinese-made pumps.

Tens of millions of smallholders have invested in their own pumps so that they can extract water from shallow aquifers whenever they choose. Governments have been unable to regulate this practice, which has led to major exploitation of water resources.

Water tables in parts of India and China have dropped catastrophically in the last few years. “It’s a trend that will become more common. The consequence will be more farmer suicides, hardship and collapsing enterprises,” said Chartres.

The food crisis is compounded by millions of wealthier people in developing countries turning away from traditional rice and cereal-based diets to western dairy and meat-based foods that require more water, says the report.

“The agriculture of tomorrow will need a lot more water. Given that one litre of water is used to produce one calorie of food, the world will need up to 6,000 cubic kilometres of additional water every year to feed another 2.5 billion people 2,500 calories per day.

“This is almost twice what we use today and is not sustainable,” said Chartres.

The report urges countries to repair and modernise irrigation systems and use better drip-fed farming. The UN expects the world to have an extra 2.5 billion mouths to feed within 40 years, most of them in developing countries. Africa’s population could double, Asia’s could grow by nearly 30% and Pakistan’s by 85%.