the EU's agrofuel folly
Despite growing public concern about the risks associated to agrofuels(1), the European Union (EU) is throwing its weight behind the promotion of these often very harmful crops. In March 2007, a proposal set targets to increase the use of agrofuels in all road transport fuel to 10 percent by 2020. The Commission is also planning to channel large amounts of EU public funds towards the research & development of agrofuel projects.
(...) However, a closer look at agrofuels, reveals a devastating picture; a so-called solution accompanied by a raft of new problems.(2) Agrofuels:
- Compete with food for agricultural resources, and their expansion has already resulted in rising food prices which directly threatens the food security of the world's poorest communities;
- Increase the pressure on land which causes, amongst other things, an increased deforestation rate;
- Are farmed in huge mono-crop plantations, involving intensive use of pesticides and fertilisers, and in many cases with the risk of genetically modified contamination. This threatens biodiversity along with other environmental hazards;
- threaten land rights as they are accompanied by plans for monoculture expansion, which tends to be controlled by big agribusiness and wealthy land owners. This threatens the human rights of small farmers and indigenous peoples across the Global South as they are evicted from their lands or face ill-health, poor working conditions and land conflicts.
(...) Furthermore, to add insult to injury, there is growing evidence that agrofuels are indeed aggravating, not mitigating, climate change.
(...) Was the Commission aware of this before backing agrofuels with a host of policy measures? According to an official Commission impact assessment, completed in 2006, they were.(3) This document mentions that, "increased use of biofuels in the EU will be accompanied by an increased external demand for biofuels and their feedstocks, which is likely to have various effects on developing countries... In addition, there are substantial CO2 losses if grassland is ploughed up or forest cleared. These losses can be expected to outweigh CO2 gains from biofuels for many years." It clearly states that "there will be increasing pressures on eco-sensitive areas, notably rainforests, where several millions of hectares could be transformed into plantations." Among the social effects the paper acknowledges the competition with food, the higher food prices which would hit the poor in developing countries and the pressure on vulnerable communities (to move away or drastically adapt their lifestyles).
(...) The Commission's agrofuel policy has not been driven by the fight against climate change, it has sought to secure energy supply and serve the needs of large farmers and agribusiness, alongside the automotive, oil and biotech sectors, all with a direct interest in maintaining the existing status quo. The Commission has enabled these corporate interests to enter into the policy dialogue and design policy outcomes, by setting up advisory groups with a clear industry bias.
(...) There is a need for a broader public debate at EU level about the risks associated with agrofuels set in the context of the problem they seek to address. This must involve a wider range of stakeholders, including those directly affected in the global South. Furthermore, the process for determining policy through research and development where public money is passed to industry players with a direct interest in a certain outcome has no democratic justification and must be challenged.
(...) The automotive, oil and biotech industries are the most involved in the design of the EU agrofuel research policy and they all have their own reasons to pursue the expansion of agrofuels.
(...) "Road transport accounts for 30% of total energy consumption in the EU, and it is 98% dependent on fossil fuels. The growing transport sector is considered to be one of the main reasons for the EU failing to meet the Kyoto targets.(18) It is expected that 90% of the increase of CO2 emissions between 1990 and 2010 will be attributable to transport.(19) Despite the huge negative impact of road transport in the overall EU greenhouse gas emissions and the threats posed by climate change, the European Commission is not putting the required effort into reducing the volume of transport. Current trends show the reverse with freight transport by road, and private vehicles for personal transport on the increase." (20)
(...) ...the negative impacts already associated with large-scale monoculture containing genetically engineered crops will be exacerbated by the large expansion of agrofuels. GM contamination is likely to increase and become more complex, when food crops are engineered with traits designed for non-food purposes.(27) Currently, GM crops are mainly for animal feed, and the same corporations that control these crops and inputs for animal feed are the ones set to benefit from their use for agrofuels.
(...) According to Berkeley professor Miguel Altieri and Food First executive director Eric Holt-Gimenez, the agrofuel agenda offers biotech companies like Monsanto "the opportunity to irreversibly convert agriculture to genetically engineered crops. Presently 52% of corn, 89% of soy and 50% of canola in the US is genetically modified (GM)." The authors argue that "the expansion of corn genetically tailored for special ethanol processing plants will remove all practical barriers to the permanent contamination of all non-GMO crops."(28)
(...) In the EU consumer resistance has to a large extent kept GM crops out. With agrofuels, the biotech industry has a chance to gain access by the back door, presenting GM crops as energy crops, not food crops. However, the risks of contamination to non-GM crops remain.
(...) Both industry and governments are responding to growing concerns about the large expansion of agrofuels by advocating second-generation agrofuels. Using the whole plant instead of isolated parts, it is claimed can achieve a better CO2 performance and reduce production costs. Furthermore, there is advantage because a wider range of feedstocks can be used, such as trees, plant waste, grass or straw. So for example, using trees instead of food crops is offered as an opportunity to avoid agrofuel's competition with food supplies. Yet, this approach is certainly not without problems. For example, large tree plantations will still compete with food in terms of land and water use. An additional problem of using whole plants is that more is being taken out of the soil as reduced organic matter remains, and this has a negative impact on ecosystems. More fundamentally, irrespective of the pros and cons and risks of individual agrofuels the main problem will still be the scale needed to meet governments' targets. There is no way of avoiding the fact that this means large monoculture plantations, in most cases controlled by big agribusiness firms and wealthy land owners, so is accompanied by the predictable negative environmental and social costs that this way of organising agricultural production brings.
(...) Activist and writer George Monbiot puts it clearly: "It used to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The governments using biofuels to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless."(33) The reality is that the EU's agrofuel folly, with its corporate bias, will do nothing to stop climate change and will have a severe impact on the global South. "While Europeans maintain their lifestyle based on automobile culture, the population of Southern countries will have less and less land for food crops and will loose its food sovereignty"(34) warned Latin American networks of civil society groups when they asked the EU not to adopt agrofuels mandatory targets.
(...) If the EU is genuinely interested in averting climate change then policies need to reflect opportunities for fundamental change focusing on reducing energy consumption and the EU's global ecological and social footprint. In the meanwhile the only sensible thing would be to establish a moratorium on all EU agrofuel targets.
(...) Large scale expansion of agrofuels creates competition for the use of agricultural resources pitting food production against fuel production. In other words, the over 800 million people suffering from hunger in the world, will compete for food/energy crops with over 800 million motor road vehicles (a figure that is fast increasing), in a highly unbalanced struggle. In reality, world food reserves are already at their lowest for decades, and for several years demand for grains and oilseeds has surpassed supply. Already, expansion of agrofuel production is resulting in rapid food price rises. For example the increasing demand for ethanol in the US has driven maize export price up by 70%. The knock-on effect of this has been a contributory factor to social unrest in Mexico, where tortillas (corn) is a staple diet.
(...) Increased demand for agrofuels in industrialised countries undermines food sovereignty across the globe. Hot-spot countries for agrofuel crop production such as Malaysia or Argentina, are being encouraged to turn land into fuel export zones, rather than concentrate on local, diverse agricultural production for domestic need.
(...) As an attempt to balance up these consequences, agrofuels are presented as an 'opportunity' for the developing world, with many studies taking as given, that they will help rural development and create employment. Yet the development of agrofuels is likely to follow the typical market-led pattern of monoculture expansion controlled by big agribusiness and wealthy land-owners. The connection between mono-agricultural production and the demise of small scale farming systems bringing with it increasing impoverishment is well documented. It leads to 'farming without farmers', where people are evicted by economic pressure (which can involve the use of violence and irregular 'land buying') and poisoning by agrochemicals. In employment terms, people are often replaced by mechanisation or face very poor working conditions. Growing popular resistance to the large-scale expansion of agrofuels in some countries of the South reinforces this case that the poor are not the ones who will benefit.
(...) Optimistic proponents of agrofuels as energy efficiency and CO2 neutral, have not taken into account the massive land use issues thrown up by their production. Nor have they considered the energy inputs involved, mainly derived from burning fossil fuels, in the growing process (fertilizers, pesticides, etc), processing crops into fuel and transporting to their final use point.
(...) A very relevant example for Europe, is the case of palm oil from South East Asia. If the EU is to meet the mandatory targets that it has proposed, a big bulk of the crop for agrofuel use in the EU will be palm oil from Indonesia and Malaysia. A study by Delft Hydraulics and Wetlands International(36) reveals that the decomposing of peatland can release 70 to 100 tonnes of CO2 per hectare per year. The report shows that European use of Southeast Asian palm oil would generate up to 10 times more CO2 than the equivalent emissions from burning fossil diesel. Indonesia alone holds 60% of all tropical peatlands, and most of these are predicted to drain, mostly for plantations, in coming years or decades leading to more than 40 billion tones of carbon emissions.(37) This is the equivalent of around six years of global fossil fuel emissions.(38) In spite of the Commission's claims to the contrary, EU imports will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions.