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.

george monbiot on climate change:
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, let's talk about your plan for being able to cut in the industrial countries 90% of energy use. How would that occur concretely in, for instance, in the United States or England without, as you say, having a collapse of the economies?
GEORGE MONBIOT: OK, well, let's take surface transport as an example, and there's huge potential here. Number one, for boosting the fuel economy of cars five- or tenfold. At the moment in the United States, the average fuel economy of cars is just over twenty-one miles per gallon. The Model T Ford in 1908 did twenty-five miles to the gallon. This country has gone backwards in terms of fuel economy. And yet the technological potential is absolutely vast. But you can go even further than that. If we still stick with cars for just a moment -
(...) You can go even further than that. Picture this scenario: the electric car. We all know the electric car works. There's plenty of models out there. The problem is that you can't go very far with it without having to plug it in again and wait eight hours for the battery to recharge. But what if you don't have to do that? What if, instead, you pull into a filling station, you lift up the hood, crane comes over, lifts out the battery, drops in another one, and off you go again? What you do in that situation is to lease your battery from a network of filling stations. You just pay for the electricity, and it takes no more time to change it than it would take to fill up your tank with gas. There, you see the potential.
(...) AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to talk about the role of hybrid vehicles, biofuels. In this year's State of the Union address, President Bush called for more investment into ethanol.
GEORGE MONBIOT: This is a total disaster, and the reason it is a disaster is twofold. Number one, you set up a competition between feeding people and feeding cars, because you're producing those crops for biofuel on the same arable land which is currently being used to feed people. That competition will necessarily be won by the car drivers. The reason for that is that, by definition, those who are rich enough to run cars are richer than those who are in danger of dying of starvation. Already, with far less than 1% of the world’s transport fuel coming from biofuel, we’ve seen a doubling in the price of corn and a near doubling in the price of wheat. And this is having an impact on people all over the world. The second reason why it's a disaster is that much of the new planting of biofuel is taking place on rainforest land or land which had other high carbon crops on it. And what we're seeing there is a massive impact, not just on biodiversity and on local habitat and environment, but also on climate change. In Malaysia and Indonesia now, the planting of palm oil for the biofuel market is the primary cause of deforestation. And one recent study shows that because you are cutting down tropical forests in order to plant it and draining peaty soils in order to plant it, every barrel of palm oil produces up to ten times as much carbon dioxide as a barrel of gasoline. Palm oil and most of the biofuels are actually worse for the planet than petroleum.
(...) GEORGE MONBIOT: This is a great paradox and cruelty of climate change, that those countries which are most responsible for it, the rich nations, most of which are in temperate parts of the world, are those which are going to be hit last by it and hit least by it. Countries which are least responsible for it, in Africa, in South Asia, for example, are already being hit by it and will be hammered by climate change.
(...) This is the great moral issue of the twenty-first century, and if we don't deal with climate change, we condemn hundreds of millions of people to death.
(...) AMY GOODMAN: Condemn people to death, these are strong words. How do they die?
GEORGE MONBIOT: In Ethiopia already, with just - what is it? - 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming, the short rains have been failing year after year now for the past four or five years, and they have been failing because of rising sea surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean. When the short rains fail, the yields of crops decline. When, in a place like Ethiopia where people are living very close to the edge already, yields of crops decline, people go hungry. People die of malnutrition-related diseases, or they simply die of starvation. If that is rolled out worldwide, which with roughly four degrees centigrade of warming, which is six-seven degrees Fahrenheit of warming, we could see structural global famine. That means that even in a normal year, normal year's harvest, there will not be enough food produced to keep everybody in the world well-fed. If that happens, the consequences are unimaginable, almost indescribable.
(...) GEORGE MONBIOT: The Bush administration's handling of climate change is like Trofim Lysenko’s handling of genetics. I mean, this is a complete clampdown on science, allied to a clampdown on democracy, and the two things often go hand in hand. It has been a story of fraud, of deception, of obfuscation, of lies. And the moment you start getting industry lobbyists with no scientific background - Cooney was a lawyer - to start editing scientific reports, you have stepped into the territory normally occupied by dictatorships.
(...) JUAN GONZALEZ: What about the prior administration, the Clinton-Gore administration? Al Gore now, of course, is a virtual folk hero of those who support moving forward in a much more broad way on climate change or climate control. What did they do when they were in office?
GEORGE MONBIOT: Have you ever noticed how much better people are at governance once they’re out of office? I mean, with Gore and Clinton, it was just a series of massive missed opportunities. They knew what they had to do, but they just didn't do it. And it has to be said that Gore's speech at the Kyoto Conference in 1997 was one of the most disgraceful pieces of international diplomacy I’ve ever come across. George Bush could have made that speech. It was just full of deliberate confusions and evasions and elisions about what needed to be done about climate change. And I’m afraid to say that the Clinton-Gore administration in some ways did more harm than the Bush administration, because while Bush has gutted the US response to climate change, Gore and Clinton gutted the international response to climate change. They made sure that the Kyoto Protocol was pretty well a dead letter. They destroyed it as an effective instrument. And so, they destroyed it for everyone.
(...) AMY GOODMAN: How did Gore and Clinton gut it?
GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, they - I mean, it has to be said that, of course, they were being pushed very hard by Congress and by powerful industrial interests, so I can't blame them entirely for what happened. But they introduced all these caveats and clauses and these get-out clauses, things like the clean development mechanism, which said you don't have to change your carbon emissions at home, you just pay somebody else to do it. And they played up to the other nations which didn't want to make serious commitments, and they made sure that even if Kyoto were to be implemented fully, which is not being implemented fully, it wouldn't make any really significant difference to cutting carbon emissions. They knew that you had to go much, much further than Kyoto went, if we were to have that cut. And knowing that, they didn't push it in the direction it needed to be going. In fact, they held it back.
(...) JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you about China. Clearly, the Chinese take a position: hey, you folks in the industrial world have to first get your house in order before you tell us about getting our house in order. But on the other hand, China right now is the manufacturing center for the industrial world, in essence, in terms of the amount of increased industrialization going on there. What's going to happen and what do you think needs to happen in terms of negotiations with China over climate change?
GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, the first thing I’d say is, before we point the finger at China, just bear in mind that the average emissions of carbon dioxide per person in China are 2.7 tons per year; in the United States, they are twenty tons per year. So it would be the height of hypocrisy to say it’s those damn Chinese who are responsible for this problem. So saying, China is rapidly emerging as an enormous emitter of greenhouse gas emissions. It's rising very fast, and it will overtake the United States probably in November this year as the world's primary emitter. So there's no question that it needs to be brought into an international mechanism to cut those greenhouse gas emissions and that it has to be brought in as an equal, not as a country which is told what to do by other countries, but as an equal partner in the development of a foundation for cutting climate change, which is actually going to work. The first thing that needs to happen if that is to take place is for the rich nations, which have already enjoyed the benefits of the massive use of fossil fuels, to show that they are serious about cutting their contribution to carbon emissions. Otherwise, China just turns around and says, “Well, you've had your fun. What about us? Why can't we have ours?” And it's absolutely essential that what is done now is that we break this perfect circle of finger-pointing, where the North Americans point to China and say, “We can't do anything. It’s those guys over there who are causing the problem,” and China points to North America and says, “We can't do anything, either. It’s those guys who are causing the problem.” That's what they're both saying at the moment, and we need to break that. And we can only break that through international leadership shown by the United States, by Europe, by the other developed regions of the world.
(...) This is the economic and the technological, indeed, an the political powerhouse of the world, and when the US steps in, things will happen very quickly indeed. Look at what happened when the United States joined the Second World War: it turned the whole economy around on a dime. Within ninety days, under pressure from the US government, your motor manufacturers were turning out fighter planes, having never looked at a fighter plane before, never designed one, never tested one, never prototyped one, anything, they were turning out fighter planes. They turned the whole thing around. That’s because of the economic and technological dynamism that the United States has. That was in 1941. Think of what you could do now. Think of how you could turn this issue around.

castro on may day:
Possibly, the population of the world then was not more than 500 million. We know that in 1830, world population reached the first billion mark, one hundred and thirty years later it multiplied by three, and forty-six years later the total number of inhabitants on the planet had grown to 6.5 billion; the immense majority of these were poor, having to share their food with domestic animals and from now on with biofuels.
(...) The large American transnationals, which produce this biofuel investing tens of billion dollars at an accelerated pace, had demanded from the imperial leader the distribution in the American market of no less than thirty-five billions (35,000,000,000) of gallons of this fuel every year. The combination of protective tariffs and real subsidies would raise that figure to almost one hundred billion dollars each year. Insatiable in its demand, the empire had flung into the world the slogan of producing biofuels in order to liberate the United States, the world's supreme energy consumer, from all external dependency on hydrocarbons.
(...) History shows that sugar as a single crop was closely associated with the enslaving of Africans, forcibly uprooted from their natural communities, and brought to Cuba, Haiti and other Caribbean islands. In Brazil, the exact same thing happened in the growing of sugar cane.
(...) Today, in that country, almost 80% of sugar cane is cut by hand. Sources and studies made by Brazilian researchers affirm that a sugarcane cutter, a piece- work laborer, must produce no less than twelve tons in order to meet basic needs. This worker needs to perform 36,630 flexing movements with his legs, make small trips 800 times carrying 15 kilos of cane in his arms and walk 8,800 meters in his chores. He loses an average of 8 liters of water every day. Only by burning cane can this productivity per man be achieved. Cane cut by hand or by machines is usually burned to protect people from nasty bites and especially to increase productivity. Even though the established norm for a working day is from 8 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon, this type of piece-work cane cutting tends to go on for a 12 hour working day. The temperature will at times rise to 45 degrees centigrade by noon.
(...) The great agricultural yields of the United States were achieved by rotating the gramineae (corn, wheat, oats, millet and other similar grains) with the legumes (soy, alfalfa, beans, etc.). These contribute nitrogen and organic material to the soil. The corn crop yield in the United States in 2005, according to FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) data was 9.3 tons per hectare. In Brazil they only obtain 3 tons of this same grain in the same area. The total production registered by this sister nation that year was thirty-four million six hundred thousand tons, consumed internally as food. It cannot contribute corn to the world market.
(...) The prices for this grain, the staple diet in numerous countries of the region, have almost doubled. What will happen when hundreds of millions of tons of corn are redirected towards the production of biofuel? And I rather not mention the amounts of wheat, millet, oats, barley, sorghum and other cereals that industrialized countries will use as a source of fuel for its engines.
(...) We know that the poorest workers from various states are the ones who gravitate towards cane cutting out of necessity. Sometimes, they must spend many months away from their families. That is what happened in Cuba until the triumph of the Revolution, when the cutting and hauling of sugarcane was done by hand, and mechanized cultivation or transportation hardly existed. With the demise of the brutal system forced on our society the cane-cutters, massively taught to read and write, abandoned their wanderings in a few years and it became necessary to replace them with hundreds of thousands of voluntary workers.
(...) Nothing could prevent American and European capital from funding the production of biofuels. They could even send the funds as gifts to Brazil and Latin America. The United States, Europe and the other industrialized countries would save more than one hundred and forty billion dollars each year, without having to worry about the consequences for the climate and the hunger which would affect the countries of the Third World in the first place. They would always be left with enough money for biofuels and to acquire the little food available on the world market at any price.
(...) Another risk of a different nature facing the world is an economic recession in the United States. In the past few days, the dollar has broken records at losing value. On the other hand, every country has most of its reserves in convertible currencies precisely in this paper currency and in American bonds.