Well, biofuel does have the one advantage that it’s not releasing “trapped” carbon – growing the plants for the fuel fixes the same amount of carbon from the atmosphere that it releases once burned – to that extent, it’s largely zero-sum, as opposed to burning oil, which was nicely sequestered in long term deposits. It’s really not a good long term solution though because as you noted, every hectare used to grow fuel crops is one fewer hectare that can be used to grow food crops, thus it results in inflation of food costs.
The future will probably go more towards a hydrogen economy with the energy to crack that hydrogen provided by solar, nuclear, wind, and geothermal sources – but thats still quite a ways off.
