Today, sugar is a cheap and sweet, if unhealthy and addictive, addition to our daily meals. But if the plans of an upstart biotechnology company established with funds from Microsoft's Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are anywhere close to what's in stock for the future, we may yet end up paying a premium price to satisfy our sweet tooth.

Sugar Beets have many food uses - Image: Northern-Crops.com

Amyris Biotechnologies, according to an article on ABC13, plans to divert sugar into the gas tank of our cars and trucks and - why not - airplanes as well. Their cutting-edge speciality - synthetic biology - promises to turn the sweet stuff into fuel. Not ethanol but gasoline or diesel ... it's all in the design of the microbes - they can be genetically engineered to do almost anything these days. What will happen to the price of sugar - and in fact anything sweetened with it - once the business gets going, is anyone's guess.

Like President Bush's ill-conceived proposal to use corn for ending America's addiction to oil, biotech designer fuels have every chance to jack up our food prices by unbalancing world agricultural markets, diverting farmers into fuel production when what we need is real food. There's little difference between using corn and sugar for fuel. Both will turn out to be expensive in the long run and both are bound to benefit not so much the users of fuels and food but the multinational corporations that control everything from oil to chemicals, pharmaceuticals and factory farming.

George Monbiot warned two years ago that biodiesel will have a significant effect on the availability of food, as long as the raw material we use competes for its cultivation with crops that have traditionally fed people.

Amyris Biotechnologies, when it was first established with a $ 43 million from Microsoft Founder Gates' Foundation, planned to make an anti-malaria drug using synthetic biotechnology. According to the ABC article, Amyris Vice-President Jack Newman said:

"This was technology that was really great for the current application of making an anti-malarial drug and we said, great, pharmaceuticals, that's a wonderful model and then we realized, our market is in Africa and they make less than a dollar a day."

That was at the time when scientists realized that artemisia or sweet wormwood, a common medicinal plant, could be used as a malaria fighter and was much more effective than the pharmaceutical drugs that were losing effectiveness against the malaria parasite. Since then, malaria fighting artemisia has been cultivated in many third world countries and the biotech upstart had to look for a more lucrative business.

The choice was biofuels, and with a fresh injection of $ 20 million in venture capital and a new CEO hired away from British Petroleum, the company is set to divert sugar into our gas tanks. BP itself is getting seriously involved in the effort, quite apart from its "donation" of a top manager. An unprecedented $ 500 million grant has been awarded by BP to the University of Berkeley, to finance a brand new Energy Biosciences Institute, the SFGate reports.

Why is there such a rush to keep us using petrol products or something very similar?Certainly there are other, more promising alternatives for capital to be employed in getting new energy technologies on line. But then - perhaps turning food to fuel may keep the great energy business "in the family".

See: Sugar in the gas tank? It might run your car someday

Inside Amyris: The Name, The People, The Beginning

Cal to be hub for study of alternate fuel - Group headed by UC Berkeley wins $500 million grant from BP