India has moved aggressively to blend ethanol into its gasoline supply, aiming to cut oil imports and reduce carbon emissions. But a new study published in PLOS One suggests the policy may come with trade-offs its architects didn’t fully anticipate — consequences for food security, water use, and other measures of sustainability.

The research, coordinated by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, models how India’s biofuel blending targets ripple outward through the country’s land use, agricultural markets, and nitrogen emissions between 2020 and 2050.

A Sugar Surplus With Downstream Effects

Because much of India’s ethanol is produced from sugarcane-derived molasses, the researchers found that scaling up blending targets drives sugar overproduction as a side effect of feeding the biofuel supply chain. That overproduction, in turn, shows up in shifting patterns of India’s net agricultural trade — the balance between what the country exports and imports — as farmland and resources are redirected toward fuel-crop production rather than food crops.

The modeling suggests that without careful policy design, a program built to serve energy security and climate goals could quietly undercut food security and strain water resources in a country that is already water-stressed in many agricultural regions.

The study was supported by Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative and the World Resources Institute, through the Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

The study was published July 8, 2026, in PLOS One (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0351419).