Quick, name the scarcest natural resources in Israel. I’m sure that “land” and “water” would feature prominently in most people’s answers.

Israel is, to all intents and purposes, a “desert island’, with finite – very finite – natural resources. Not your romantic desert island, and not an island geographically, but rather politically. Not a desert entirely, but dominated by arid lands, and with much of the rest what might be considered recovering or rehabilitated. Some of that is again under threat from various forces, mainly driven by economic and political factors, population growth and lifestyle.

So, while there have been few serious proposals for converting Israeli agricultural production to bio-fuel crop production, would it in theory make sense to ever do so?

Not if one applies the understandings shared by noted German economist Hans Werner Sinn in this Jerusalem Post article. The president of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research was visiting Israel last week to give the D.B. Doran Lecture on Population, Resources and Development at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem lecturing about the problems of land use for biofuel.