Agriculture secre tary Edward T. Schafer is preparing to walk into a buzzsaw of criticism over American biofuels policy when he meets with world leaders to discuss the global food crisis next week. Mr Schafer took the offensive at a press conference on Thursday that discussed the food summit, planned for Rome. He said an analysis by the agriculture depart ment had determined that biofuel production was responsible for only 2 to 3 per cent of the increase in global food prices, while biofuels had reduced consumption of crude oil by a million barrels a day. "We think that policy-wise in the United States of America - and certainly in the rest of the world - as we see the price of oil and petroleum escalate dramatically beyond anyone's imagination, that one of the ways to deal with that is to pro duce biofuels which are renewables, better for the environment and help lower that cost," he said. Mr Schafer's remarks came as ethanol and biofuels are coming under increasing criticism from foreign leaders and members of Congress, as grocery prices climb in the developed world and malnutrition and hunger threaten to spread in the poorest nations. Just hours before his comments, a major report was released in Paris that urged countries to reconsider biofuels policies in the wake of soaring food prices. "The energy security, environmental and economic benefits of biofuels production based on agricultural commodity feed stocks are at best modest, and sometimes even negative," says the report, prepared by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). "Alternative approaches may be consid ered that offer potentially greater benefits with less of the unintended market impact." The agriculture department's own longtime chief economist, Keith Collins, who retired in January, said that ethanol was the "foot on the accelerator" of corn demand - an essential feed for animals, as well as a part of many diets - and merited renewed debate. He said Congressional mandates for ethanol would require farmers to grow more corn for conversion to biofuel, at the expense of feed corn and other food crops. "You're building in tremendous increase in demand," said Mr Collins, who emphasised that he was not necessarily against ethanol. "It's an increase that is going to feed into food prices." The UN report, the global agriculture outlook through 2017, said prices for farm crops will remain substantially higher over the next decade.