SIR – Drivers in the West Midlands may not know that every time they fill up with fuel they are using biofuels made from food crops such as wheat.

In the West Midlands alone, the development charity ActionAid’s Food not Fuel campaign shows we burn enough food in our tanks as biofuels each year to feed 740,000 people.

This is shocking when you consider that one in eight people around the world goes to bed hungry every night.

Biofuels were introduced as a supposedly ‘green’ alternative to petrol.

But there is now scientific consensus that most biofuels release more greenhouse gases than the fossil fuels they were meant to replace.

In addition, growing crops to make fuel instead of food drives up food prices and forces people in poor countries off their land to make way for biofuels plantations.

Worcester News readers have an opportunity to help curb this madness by calling on their MEP to take action.

Phil Bennion, one of the MEPs for the West Midlands, is a leading MEP on this issue and will be voting on this in a crucial decision in the European Parliament in September.

Mr Bennion must lead the way in ensuring that they vote for food not fuel and end the travesty that sees food crops burned in our cars while hundreds of millions of people go hungry.

Ask them to vote the right way at actionaid.org.uk/ foodnotfuel.

NEIL MARR

Worcester