THAT is not an exaggerated figure, but rather a cautious one. I have meditated a lot on that in the wake of President Bush’s meeting with U.S. automobile manufacturers.
The sinister idea of converting food into fuel was definitively established as an economic line in U.S. foreign policy last Monday, March 26.
A cable from the AP, the U.S. news agency that reaches all corners of the world, states verbatim:
“WASHINGTON, March 26 (AP). President Bush touted the benefits of ‘flexible fuel’ vehicles running on ethanol and biodiesel on Monday, meeting with automakers to boost support for his energy plans.
“Bush said a commitment by the leaders of the domestic auto industry to double their production of flex-fuel vehicles could help motorists shift away from gasoline and reduce the nation's reliance on imported oil.
‘“That's a major technological breakthrough for the country,’ Bush said after inspecting three alternative vehicles. If the nation wants to reduce gasoline use, he said “the consumer has got to be in a position to make a rational choice.”
“The president urged Congress to ‘move expeditiously’ on legislation the administration recently proposed to require the use of 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels by 2017 and seek higher fuel economy standards for automobiles.
“Bush met with General Motors Corp. chairman and chief executive Rick Wagoner, Ford Motor Co. chief executive Alan Mulally and DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler Group chief executive Tom LaSorda.
“They discussed support for flex-fuel vehicles, attempts to develop ethanol from alternative sources like switchgrass and wood chips and the administration's proposal to reduce gas consumption by 20 percent in 10 years.
“The discussions came amid rising gasoline prices. The latest Lundberg Survey found the nationwide average for gasoline has risen 6 cents per gallon in the past two weeks to $2.61.”
I believe that reducing and moreover recycling all motors that run on electricity and fuel is an elemental and urgent need for all humanity. The tragedy does not lie in reducing those energy costs but in the idea of converting food into fuel.
It is known very precisely today that one ton of corn can only produce 413 liters of ethanol on average, according to densities. That is equivalent to 109 gallons.
The average price of corn in U.S. ports has risen to $167 per ton. Thus, 320 million tons of corn would be required to produce 35 billion gallons of ethanol.
According to FAO figures, the U.S. corn harvest rose to 280.2 million tons in the year 2005.
Although the president is talking of producing fuel derived from grass or wood shavings, anyone can understand that these are phrases totally lacking in realism. Let’s be clear: 35 billion gallons translates into 35 followed by nine zeros!
Afterwards will come beautiful examples of what experienced and well-organized U.S. farmers can achieve in terms of human productivity by hectare: corn converted into ethanol; the chaff from that corn converted into animal feed containing 26% protein; cattle dung used as raw material for gas production. Of course, this is after voluminous investments only within the reach of the most powerful enterprises, in which everything has to be moved on the basis of electricity and fuel consumption. Apply that recipe to the countries of the Third World and you will see that people among the hungry masses of the Earth will no longer eat corn. Or something worse: lend funding to poor countries to produce corn ethanol based on corn or any other food and not a single tree will be left to defend humanity from climate change.
Other countries in the rich world are planning to use not only corn but also wheat, sunflower seeds, rapeseed and other foods for fuel production. For the Europeans, for example, it would become a business to import all of the world’s soybeans with the aim of reducing the fuel costs for their automobiles and feeding their animals with the chaff from that legume, particularly rich in all types of essential amino acids.
In Cuba, alcohol used to be produced as a byproduct of the sugar industry after having made three extractions of sugar from cane juice. Climate change is already affecting our sugar production. Lengthy periods of drought alternating with record rainfall, that barely make it possible to produce sugar with an adequate yield during the 100 days of our very moderate winter; hence, there is less sugar per ton of cane or less cane per hectare due to prolonged drought in the months of planting and cultivation.
I understand that in Venezuela they would be using alcohol not for export but to improve the environmental quality of their own fuel. For that reason, apart from the excellent Brazilian technology for producing alcohol, in Cuba the use of such a technology for the direct production of alcohol from sugar cane juice is no more than a dream or the whim of those carried away by that idea. In our country, land handed over to the direct production of alcohol could be much useful for food production for the people and for environmental protection.
All the countries of the world, rich and poor, without any exception, could save millions and millions of dollars in investment and fuel simply by changing all the incandescent light bulbs for fluorescent ones, an exercise that Cuba has carried out in all homes throughout the country. That would provide a breathing space to resist climate change without killing the poor masses through hunger.
As can be observed, I am not using adjectives to qualify the system and the lords of the earth. That task can be excellently undertaken by news experts and honest social, economic and political scientists abounding in the world who are constantly delving into to the present and future of our species. A computer and the growing number of Internet networks are sufficient for that.
Today, we are seeing for the first time a really globalized economy and a dominant power in the economic, political and military terrain that in no way resembles that of Imperial Rome.
Some people will be asking themselves why I am talking of hunger and thirst. My response to that: it is not about the other side of the coin, but about several sides of something else, like a die with six sides, or a polyhedron with many more sides.
I refer in this case to an official news agency, founded in 1945 and generally well-informed about economic and social questions in the world: TELAM. It said, and I quote:
“In just 18 years, close to 2 billion people will be living in countries and regions where water will be a distant memory. Two-thirds of the world’s population could be living in places where that scarcity produces social and economic tensions of such a magnitude that it could lead nations to wars for the precious ‘blue gold.’
“Over the last 100 years, the use of water has increased at a rate twice as fast as that of population growth.
“According to statistics from the World Water Council, it is estimated that by 2015, the number of inhabitants affected by this grave situation will rise by 3.5 billion people.
“The United Nations celebrated World Water Day on March 23, and called to begin confronting, that very day, the international scarcity of water, under the coordination of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), with the goal of highlighting the increasing importance of water scarcity on a global scale, and the need for greater integration and cooperation that would make it possible to guarantee sustained and efficient management of water resources.
“Many regions on the planet are suffering from severe water shortages, living with less than 500 cubic meters per person per year. The number of regions suffering from chronic scarcity of this vital element is increasingly growing.
“The principal consequences of water scarcity are an insufficient amount of the precious liquid for producing food, the impossibility of industrial, urban and tourism development and health problems.”
That was the TELEAM cable.
In this case I will refrain from mentioning other important facts, like the melting ice in Greenland and the Antarctic, damage to the ozone layer and the growing volume of mercury in many species of fish for common consumption.
There are other issues that could be addressed, but with these lines I am just trying to comment on President Bush’s meeting with the principal executives of U.S. automakers.
March 28, 2007
Fidel Castro.
Showing posts with label biofuel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label biofuel. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Monday, October 29, 2007
Biofuels 'crime against humanity'
By Grant Ferrett
BBC News
A United Nations expert has condemned the growing use of crops to produce biofuels as a replacement for petrol as a crime against humanity.
The UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, said he feared biofuels would bring more hunger.
The growth in the production of biofuels has helped to push the price of some crops to record levels.
Mr Ziegler's remarks, made at the UN headquarters in New York, are clearly designed to grab attention.
He complained of an ill-conceived dash to convert foodstuffs such as maize and sugar into fuel, which created a recipe for disaster.
Food price rises
It was, he said, a crime against humanity to divert arable land to the production of crops which are then burned for fuel.
He called for a five-year ban on the practice.
Within that time, according to Mr Ziegler, technological advances would enable the use of agricultural waste, such as corn cobs and banana leaves, rather than crops themselves to produce fuel.
The growth in the production of biofuels has been driven, in part, by the desire to find less environmentally-damaging alternatives to oil.
The United States is also keen to reduce its reliance on oil imported from politically unstable regions.
But the trend has contributed to a sharp rise in food prices as farmers, particularly in the US, switch production from wheat and soya to corn, which is then turned into ethanol.
Mr Ziegler is not alone in warning of the problem.
The IMF last week voiced concern that the increasing global reliance on grain as a source of fuel could have serious implications for the world's poor.
BBC News
A United Nations expert has condemned the growing use of crops to produce biofuels as a replacement for petrol as a crime against humanity.
The UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, said he feared biofuels would bring more hunger.
The growth in the production of biofuels has helped to push the price of some crops to record levels.
Mr Ziegler's remarks, made at the UN headquarters in New York, are clearly designed to grab attention.
He complained of an ill-conceived dash to convert foodstuffs such as maize and sugar into fuel, which created a recipe for disaster.
Food price rises
It was, he said, a crime against humanity to divert arable land to the production of crops which are then burned for fuel.
He called for a five-year ban on the practice.
Within that time, according to Mr Ziegler, technological advances would enable the use of agricultural waste, such as corn cobs and banana leaves, rather than crops themselves to produce fuel.
The growth in the production of biofuels has been driven, in part, by the desire to find less environmentally-damaging alternatives to oil.
The United States is also keen to reduce its reliance on oil imported from politically unstable regions.
But the trend has contributed to a sharp rise in food prices as farmers, particularly in the US, switch production from wheat and soya to corn, which is then turned into ethanol.
Mr Ziegler is not alone in warning of the problem.
The IMF last week voiced concern that the increasing global reliance on grain as a source of fuel could have serious implications for the world's poor.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Biofuels: The Five Myths of the Agro-fuels Transition By Eric Holt-Giménez
By Eric Holt-Giménez
Global Research, June 30, 2007
ALAI
Biofuels. The term invokes a life-giving image of renewability and abundance—a clean, green, sustainable assurance in technology and the power of progress. This image allows industry, politicians, the World Bank, the United Nations, and even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to present fuels made from corn, sugarcane, soy and other crops as the next step in a smooth transition from peak oil to a yet-to-be-defined renewable fuel economy. Drawing its power from a cluster of simple cornucopian myths, “biofuels” directs our attention away from the powerful economic interests that benefit from this transition. It avoids discussion of the growing North-South food and energy imbalance. More fundamentally, it obscures the political-economic relationships between land, people, resources and food. By showing us only one side, “biofuels” fails to help us understand the profound consequences of the industrial transformation of our food and fuel systems—The Agro-fuels Transition.
The Agro-fuels Boom
Industrialized countries unleashed an “agro-fuels boom” by mandating ambitious renewable fuel targets. Renewable fuels are scheduled to provide 5.75% of Europe’s transport fuel by 2010, and 10 percent by 2020. The United States aims at 35 billion gallons a year. These targets far exceed the agricultural capacities of the industrial North. Europe would need to plant 70% of its farmland to fuel. The U.S.’s entire corn and soy harvest would need to be processed as ethanol and bio-diesel. Converting the bulk of their arable land to fuel crops would wreak havoc with the North’s food systems. Therefore, OECD countries are looking to the Global South to meet their fuel demands. Southern governments appear eager to oblige. Indonesia and Malaysia are rapidly expanding oil-palm plantations in an effort to supply up to 20 percent of the EU bio-diesel market. In Brazil—where fuel crop acreage already occupies a land area the size of Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Great Britain combined—the government is planning a five-fold increase in sugar cane acreage. Their goal is to replace 10 percent of the world’s gasoline by 2025.
The rapid capitalization and concentration of power within the agro-fuels industry is breathtaking. Over the last three years venture capital investment in agro-fuels has increased eightfold. Private investment is swamping public research institutions, as evidenced by BP’s recent award of half a billion dollars to the University of California. Behind the scenes—and under the noses of most national anti-trust laws—giant oil, grain, auto and genetic engineering corporations are forming powerful partnerships: ADM and Monsanto, Chevron and Volkswagen; BP, DuPont, and Toyota. These corporations are consolidating the research, production, processing, and distribution chains of our food and fuel systems under one colossal, industrial roof.
Agro-fuel champions assure us that because fuel crops are renewable, they are environmentally–friendly, can reduce global warming, and will foster rural development. But the tremendous market power of agro-fuel corporations, coupled with the poor political will on the part of governments to regulate their activities, leads us to doubt these happy scenarios. Before jumping on the bandwagon, the mythic baggage of the agro-fuels transition needs to be publicly unpacked:
Myth #1: Agro-fuels are clean and green
Because photosynthesis from fuel crops removes green house gases from atmosphere and can reduce fossil fuel consumption, we are told fuel crops are green. But when the full “life cycle” of agro-fuels is considered—from land clearing to automotive consumption—the moderate emission savings are undone by far greater emissions from deforestation, burning, peat drainage, cultivation, and soil carbon losses. Every ton of palm oil produced results in 33 tons of carbon dioxide emissions—10 times more than petroleum.[1] Tropical forests cleared for sugar cane ethanol emit 50 percent more greenhouse gasses than the production and use of the same amount of gasoline[2] Commenting on the global carbon balance, Doug Parr, chief UK scientist at Greenpeace states flatly, “If even five percent of biofuels are sourced from wiping out existing ancient forests, you’ve lost all your carbon gain.”
There are other environmental problems as well. Industrial agro-fuels require large applications of petroleum-based fertilizers, whose global use—now at 45 million tons/year—has more than doubled the biologically available nitrogen in the world, contributing heavily to the emission of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than CO². In the tropics—where most of the world’s agro-fuels will soon be grown—chemical fertilizer has 10-100 times the impact on global warming compared to temperate soil applications.[3] To produce a liter of ethanol takes three to five liters of irrigation water and produces up to 13 liters of waste water. It takes the energy equivalent of 113 liters of natural gas to treat this waste, increasing the likelihood that it will simply be released into the environment to pollute streams, rivers and groundwater[4] Intensive cultivation of fuel crops also leads to high rates of erosion, particularly in soy production—from 6.5 tons/hectare in the U.S. to up to 12 tons/hectare in Brazil and Argentina.
Myth #2: Agro-fuels will not result in deforestation
Proponents of agro-fuels argue that fuel crops planted on ecologically degraded lands will improve rather than destroy the environment. Perhaps the government of Brazil had this in mind when it re-classified some 200 million hectares of dry-tropical forests, grassland, and marshes as “degraded” and apt for cultivation[5] In reality, these are the bio-diverse ecosystems of the Mata Atlantica the Cerrado and the Pantanal, occupied by indigenous people, subsistence farmers, and extensive cattle ranches. The introduction of agro-fuel plantations will simply push these communities to the “agricultural frontier” of the Amazon where the devastating patterns of deforestation are all too well-known. Soybeans supply 40 percent of Brazil’s biodiesel. NASA has positively correlated their market price with the destruction of the Amazon rainforest—currently at nearly 325,000 hectares a year. Called “The Diesel of Deforestation,” palm oil plantations for bio-diesel are the primary cause of forest loss in Indonesia, a country with one of the highest deforestation rates in the world. By 2020, Indonesia’s oil-palm plantations will triple in size to 16.5 million hectares—an area the size of England and Wales combined—resulting in a loss of 98% of forest cover.[6] Neighboring Malaysia, the world’s largest producer of palm oil, has already lost 87% of its tropical forests and continues deforesting at a rate of seven percent a year.
Myth #3; Agro-fuels will bring rural development
In the tropics, 100 hectares dedicated to family farming generates thirty-five jobs. Oil palm and sugar cane provide 10 jobs, eucalyptus two, and soybeans a scant half-job per 100 hectares, all poorly paid. Until recently, agro-fuels supplied primarily local and sub-regional markets. Even in the U.S., most ethanol plants were relatively small, and farmer-owned. With the agro-fuels boom big industry is quickly moving in, centralizing operations and creating gargantuan economies of scale. Big Oil, Big Grain, and Big Genetic engineering are rapidly consolidating control over the entire agro-fuel value chain. The market power of these corporations is staggering: Cargill and ADM control 65 percent of the global grain trade, Monsanto and Syngenta a quarter of the $60 billion gene-tech industry. This market power allows these companies to extract profits from the most lucrative and low-risk segments of the value chain, e.g., inputs, processing and distribution. Agro-fuels producers will be increasingly dependent on a tightly-organized cabal of companies for their seed, inputs, services, processing and sale. They are not likely to receive many benefits.[7] More likely, smallholders will be forced out of the market and off the land. Hundreds of thousands have already been displaced by the soybean plantations in the “Republic of Soy” a 50+ million hectare area covering southern Brazil, northern Argentina, Paraguay, and eastern Bolivia.[8]
Myth #4: Agro-fuels will not cause hunger
Hunger, said Amartya Sen, results not from scarcity, but poverty. According to the FAO, there is enough food in the world to supply everyone with a daily 3,200-calorie diet of fresh fruit, nuts, vegetables, dairy and meat. Nonetheless, because they are poor, 824 million people continue to go hungry. In 2000, world leaders promised to halve the proportion of hungry people living in extreme poverty by 2015. Little progress has been made. The world's poorest people already spend 50-80% of their total household income on food. They suffer when high fuel prices push up food prices. Now, because food and fuel crops are competing over land and resources, high food prices may actually push up fuel prices. Both increase the prices of land and water. This perverse, inflationary spiral puts food and productive resources out of reach for the poor. The International Food Policy Research Institute has estimated that the price of basic food staples will increase 20-33 percent by the year 2010 and 26-135 percent by the year 2020. Caloric consumption typically declines as price rises by a ratio of 1:2. With every 1 percent rise in the cost of food, 16 million people are made food insecure. If current trends continue, some 1.2 billion people could be chronically hungry by 2025—600 million more than previously predicted.[9] World food aid will not likely come to the rescue because our surpluses will go to our gas tanks. Perversely, food aid only increases when food prices are low, not high. Instead of converting land to fuel production, what are urgently needed are massive transfers of food-producing resources to the rural poor.
Myth #5: Better “second-generation” agro-fuels are just around the corner
Proponents of agro-fuels like to reassure “food versus fuel” skeptics by asserting that present agro-fuels made from food crops will soon be replaced with environmentally-friendly crops like fast-growing trees and switchgrass. This myth, wryly referred to as the “bait and switch-grass” shell game, helps make first generation agro-fuels socially acceptable.
The agro-fuel transition transforms land use on massive scales, pitting food production against fuel production for land, water and resources. The issue of which crops are converted to fuel is irrelevant. Wild plants cultivated as fuel crops won’t have a smaller “environmental footprint” because commercialization will transform their ecology. They will rapidly migrate from hedgerows and woodlots onto arable lands to be intensively cultivated like any other industrial crop—with all the associated environmental externalities.
By genetically engineering plants with less lignin and cellulose, the industry aims to produce cellulosic agro-fuel crops that break down easily to liberate sugars, especially fast-growing trees. Trees are perennial and spread pollen father than food crops. Cellulosic candidates miscanthus, switch grass, and canary grass, are invasive species. Given the demonstrated promiscuity of genetically-engineered crops, we can expect massive genetic contamination. Monsanto and Syngenta will be quite pleased. Agro-fuels will serve as their genetic Trojan horse, allowing them to fully colonize both our fuel and food systems.
Any technology with potential to avoid the worst impacts of global warming must be commercially viable on a global scale within the next 5-8 years. This is highly unlikely with cellulosic ethanol, a product that has thus far demonstrated no carbon savings. Making it a green, viable product is not simply matter of scaling up existing technology, but of major breakthroughs in plant physiology that permit the economically efficient breakdown of cellulose, hemi-cellulose, and lignin. The agro-fuel industry is either betting on miracles or counting on taxpayer bail-outs. Faith in science is not science. Selective faith in second-generation fuel—rather than working to improve existing solar, wind, or conservation technologies—is bias in favor of the highest bidder.
The Twin is Dead, Long live the Twin
The International Energy Agency estimates that over the next 23 years, the world could produce as much as 147 million tons of agro-fuel. This will be accompanied by a lot of carbon, nitrous oxide, erosion, and over 2 billion tons of waste water. Remarkably, this fuel will barely offset the yearly increase in global oil demand, now standing at 136 million tons a year—never mind offsetting any of the existing demand. Is this worth it?
The agro-fuel transition closes a 200-year chapter in the relation between agriculture and industry that began with the Industrial Revolution. Then, the invention of the steam engine promised an end to drudgery. However, industry’s take-off lagged until governments privatized common lands, driving the poorest peasants out of agriculture and into urban factories. Peasant agriculture effectively subsidized industry with both cheap food and cheap labor. Over the next 100 years, as industry grew, so did the urban percentage of the world’s population: from 3% to 13%. Cheap oil and petroleum-based fertilizers opened up agriculture itself to industrial capital. Mechanization intensified production, keeping food prices low and industry booming. The next hundred years saw a three-fold global shift to urban living. Today, the world has as many people living in cities as in the countryside. [10] The massive transfer of wealth from agriculture to industry, the industrialization of agriculture, and the rural-urban shift are all part of the “Agrarian Transition,” the lesser-known twin of the Industrial Revolution. The Agrarian/Industrial twins transformed most of the world’s fuel and food systems and established non-renewable petroleum as the foundation of today’s multi-trillion dollar agri-foods complex.
The pillars of the agri-foods industry are the great grain corporations, e.g., ADM, Cargill and Bunge. They are surrounded by an equally formidable phalanx of food processors, distributors, and supermarket chains on one hand, and agro-chemical, seed, and machinery companies on the other. Together, these industries consume four of every five food dollars. For some time, the production side of the agri-foods complex has suffered from agricultural “involution” in which increasing rates of investment (chemical inputs, genetic engineering, and machinery) have not increased the rates of agricultural productivity—the agri-foods complex is paying more and reaping less.
Agro-fuels are the perfect answer to involution because they’re subsidized, grow as oil shrinks, and facilitate the concentration of market power in the hands of the most powerful players in the food and fuel industries. Like the original Agrarian Transition, the present Agro-fuels Transition will “enclose the commons” by industrializing the remaining forests and prairies of the world. It will drive the planet’s remaining smallholders, family farmers, and indigenous peoples to the cities. It will funnel rural resources to urban centers in the form of fuel, and will generate massive amounts of industrial wealth.
Unfortunately, the agro-fuels transition suffers from a congenital flaw: its fraternal twin is dead. There is no new Industrial Revolution. No expanding industrial sector waits to receive displaced indigenous communities, smallholders and rural workers. There are no production breakthroughs poised to flood the world with cheap food. This time, fuel will not subsidize agriculture with cheap energy. On the contrary, fuel will compete with food for land, water and resources. Agro-fuels collapse the industrial link between food and fuel. Taken to its extreme, agro-fuel will be used to grow agro-fuel—a thermodynamically pathetic proposition. The inherent entropy of industrial agriculture was invisible as long as oil was abundant. Now, food and fuel systems must shift from a savings to a checking account. Agro-fuels lead us to overdraw. “Renewable” does not mean “limitless.” Even if crops can be replanted, land, water, and nutrients are limiting. Pretending otherwise serves the interests of those monopolizing those resources.
Agro-fuel’s appeal lies with its potential to prolong the oil economy. With an estimated one trillion barrels of oil reserves left on the planet, $100-a-barrel oil is not far off.[11] The higher the oil prices, the more ethanol costs can rise while remaining competitive. Herein lays the contradiction for second generation agro-fuels: as oil becomes more expensive, first generation agro-fuels become more lucrative, discouraging the development of second-generation fuels. If oil reaches $80 per barrel, ethanol producers could afford to pay over $5 per bushel (~127 kg.) for corn, making it competitive with sugar cane as well. The planet’s energy crisis is potentially an $80—100 trillion dollar bonanza for food and fuel corporations. No wonder we are invited to consume our way out of over-consumption.
Limits—not incentives—must be placed on the agro-fuels industry. It is unconscionable for the North to shift the burden of over-consumption to the Global South simply because the tropics have more sunlight, rain and arable land. If agro-fuels are to be forest and food friendly, clearly the grain, cane, and oil-palm industries need to be regulated, and not in piecemeal fashion. Strong, enforceable standards based on limiting land planted to agro-fuels are urgently needed, as are anti-trust laws powerful enough to prevent the corporate concentration of market power in the industry. Sustainable benefits to the countryside will only accrue if agro-fuels are a complement to territorial plans for sustainable rural development, not the centerpiece.
Building Food and Fuel Sovereignty
The Agro-fuels Transition is not inevitable. There is no reason to sacrifice the possibility of sustainable, equitable food and fuel systems to an industrial strategy that compromises both. Many successful, locally-focused, energy-efficient and people-centered alternatives are presently producing food and fuel in ways that do not threaten food systems, the environment, or livelihoods. The question is not whether ethanol and bio-diesel per-se have a place in our future, but whether or not we allow a handful of global corporations to determine our future by dragging us down the dead end of the agro-fuels transition. To avoid this trap we have to abandon the cornucopian myths left over from the age of abundant oil. We must dare to envision a different, steady-state agrarian transition built on re-distributive land reform that re-populates and stabilizes the world’s struggling rural communities. We need to rebuild and strengthen our local food systems, and ensure conditions for the local re-investment of rural wealth. Putting people and environment—instead of corporate mega-profits—at the center of rural development requires food sovereignty: the right of people to determine their own food systems.
In both the Industrial North and the Global South, hundreds of thousands of producers and consumers are actively organizing for their right to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods. They are also re-building local food systems architecture to ensure that most of the wealth and benefits of food systems accrue locally—not in the distant corporate coffers of the agri-foods giants. They are holding agri-foods corporations accountable for the externalities that their industry imposes on taxpayers in the form of hunger, environmental destruction and poor health from cheap, processed foods. Social movements for land reform, indigenous rights, farmer-to-farmer sustainable agriculture, ethical trade, farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture, inner-city gardens and neighborhood-food systems development, are a few examples of the widespread, multi-faceted efforts for food sovereignty. Organizations like international Via Campesina, Brazil’s landless movement (MST), the Federation of Southern Cooperatives of African-American Farmers, and the Community Food Security Coalition, are transforming the social will from these rural and urban movements into political will—the formula for social change.
Food Sovereignty movements are already squaring off with the agro-fuels boom. When U.S. president George Bush arrived in Brazil to establish an ethanol partnership with Lula, 700 women from Via Campesina greeted him by occupying Cargill’s sugar mill in Sao Paulo in protest. But derailing the agro-fuels juggernaut entails changing the Agro-fuels Transition from an agrarian transition that favors industry to one that actually favors rural communities—a transition that does not drain wealth from the countryside, but that puts resources in the hands of rural peoples. This is a far-reaching project. A good nest step would be to launch a pro-active, global moratorium on the expansion of agro-fuels. Time and public debate is needed to assess the potential impacts of agro-fuels, and to develop the regulatory structures, programs, and incentives for conservation and food and fuel development alternatives. We need the time to forge a better transition—an agrarian transition to food and fuel sovereignty.
Eric Holt-Giménez, Ph.D., is Executive Director, Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy
NOTES
1.Delft Hydraulics in George Monbiot, “If we want to save the planet, we need a five-year freeze on biofuels” The Guardian, 3/27/2007
2. David Tilman and Jason Hill, Washington Post, 3/25/07
3. Miguel Altieri and Elizabeth Bravo, “The ecological and social tragedy of biofuels,” 5/1/07, www.foodfirst.org ,
4. Ecologist, May, 2007
5. Plano Nacional de Agroenergia 2006-2011, In Camila Moreno, “Agroenergia X Soberania Alimentar: a Questão Agrária do século XXI”, 2006
6.The Ecologist, Ibid
7. Annie Dufey, “International trade in biofuels: Good for development? And good for environment?” International Institute for Environment and Development, 2006.
8. Bravo, E. 2006, Biocombustibles, cutlivos energeticos y soberania alimentaria: encendiendo el debate sobre biocommustibles. Accion Ecologica, Quito, Ecuador
9. C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer, “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor”,
Foreign Affairs, May/June 2007
10. “The World Goes to Town,” The Economist, 5/11/07
11. Caroline Lucas Mep, et al “Fuelling a Food Crisis: The impact of peak oil on food security”, The Greens/European Free Alliance, European Parliament, 12/06
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"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
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A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. -- Edward R. Murrow
Global Research, June 30, 2007
ALAI
Biofuels. The term invokes a life-giving image of renewability and abundance—a clean, green, sustainable assurance in technology and the power of progress. This image allows industry, politicians, the World Bank, the United Nations, and even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to present fuels made from corn, sugarcane, soy and other crops as the next step in a smooth transition from peak oil to a yet-to-be-defined renewable fuel economy. Drawing its power from a cluster of simple cornucopian myths, “biofuels” directs our attention away from the powerful economic interests that benefit from this transition. It avoids discussion of the growing North-South food and energy imbalance. More fundamentally, it obscures the political-economic relationships between land, people, resources and food. By showing us only one side, “biofuels” fails to help us understand the profound consequences of the industrial transformation of our food and fuel systems—The Agro-fuels Transition.
The Agro-fuels Boom
Industrialized countries unleashed an “agro-fuels boom” by mandating ambitious renewable fuel targets. Renewable fuels are scheduled to provide 5.75% of Europe’s transport fuel by 2010, and 10 percent by 2020. The United States aims at 35 billion gallons a year. These targets far exceed the agricultural capacities of the industrial North. Europe would need to plant 70% of its farmland to fuel. The U.S.’s entire corn and soy harvest would need to be processed as ethanol and bio-diesel. Converting the bulk of their arable land to fuel crops would wreak havoc with the North’s food systems. Therefore, OECD countries are looking to the Global South to meet their fuel demands. Southern governments appear eager to oblige. Indonesia and Malaysia are rapidly expanding oil-palm plantations in an effort to supply up to 20 percent of the EU bio-diesel market. In Brazil—where fuel crop acreage already occupies a land area the size of Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Great Britain combined—the government is planning a five-fold increase in sugar cane acreage. Their goal is to replace 10 percent of the world’s gasoline by 2025.
The rapid capitalization and concentration of power within the agro-fuels industry is breathtaking. Over the last three years venture capital investment in agro-fuels has increased eightfold. Private investment is swamping public research institutions, as evidenced by BP’s recent award of half a billion dollars to the University of California. Behind the scenes—and under the noses of most national anti-trust laws—giant oil, grain, auto and genetic engineering corporations are forming powerful partnerships: ADM and Monsanto, Chevron and Volkswagen; BP, DuPont, and Toyota. These corporations are consolidating the research, production, processing, and distribution chains of our food and fuel systems under one colossal, industrial roof.
Agro-fuel champions assure us that because fuel crops are renewable, they are environmentally–friendly, can reduce global warming, and will foster rural development. But the tremendous market power of agro-fuel corporations, coupled with the poor political will on the part of governments to regulate their activities, leads us to doubt these happy scenarios. Before jumping on the bandwagon, the mythic baggage of the agro-fuels transition needs to be publicly unpacked:
Myth #1: Agro-fuels are clean and green
Because photosynthesis from fuel crops removes green house gases from atmosphere and can reduce fossil fuel consumption, we are told fuel crops are green. But when the full “life cycle” of agro-fuels is considered—from land clearing to automotive consumption—the moderate emission savings are undone by far greater emissions from deforestation, burning, peat drainage, cultivation, and soil carbon losses. Every ton of palm oil produced results in 33 tons of carbon dioxide emissions—10 times more than petroleum.[1] Tropical forests cleared for sugar cane ethanol emit 50 percent more greenhouse gasses than the production and use of the same amount of gasoline[2] Commenting on the global carbon balance, Doug Parr, chief UK scientist at Greenpeace states flatly, “If even five percent of biofuels are sourced from wiping out existing ancient forests, you’ve lost all your carbon gain.”
There are other environmental problems as well. Industrial agro-fuels require large applications of petroleum-based fertilizers, whose global use—now at 45 million tons/year—has more than doubled the biologically available nitrogen in the world, contributing heavily to the emission of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than CO². In the tropics—where most of the world’s agro-fuels will soon be grown—chemical fertilizer has 10-100 times the impact on global warming compared to temperate soil applications.[3] To produce a liter of ethanol takes three to five liters of irrigation water and produces up to 13 liters of waste water. It takes the energy equivalent of 113 liters of natural gas to treat this waste, increasing the likelihood that it will simply be released into the environment to pollute streams, rivers and groundwater[4] Intensive cultivation of fuel crops also leads to high rates of erosion, particularly in soy production—from 6.5 tons/hectare in the U.S. to up to 12 tons/hectare in Brazil and Argentina.
Myth #2: Agro-fuels will not result in deforestation
Proponents of agro-fuels argue that fuel crops planted on ecologically degraded lands will improve rather than destroy the environment. Perhaps the government of Brazil had this in mind when it re-classified some 200 million hectares of dry-tropical forests, grassland, and marshes as “degraded” and apt for cultivation[5] In reality, these are the bio-diverse ecosystems of the Mata Atlantica the Cerrado and the Pantanal, occupied by indigenous people, subsistence farmers, and extensive cattle ranches. The introduction of agro-fuel plantations will simply push these communities to the “agricultural frontier” of the Amazon where the devastating patterns of deforestation are all too well-known. Soybeans supply 40 percent of Brazil’s biodiesel. NASA has positively correlated their market price with the destruction of the Amazon rainforest—currently at nearly 325,000 hectares a year. Called “The Diesel of Deforestation,” palm oil plantations for bio-diesel are the primary cause of forest loss in Indonesia, a country with one of the highest deforestation rates in the world. By 2020, Indonesia’s oil-palm plantations will triple in size to 16.5 million hectares—an area the size of England and Wales combined—resulting in a loss of 98% of forest cover.[6] Neighboring Malaysia, the world’s largest producer of palm oil, has already lost 87% of its tropical forests and continues deforesting at a rate of seven percent a year.
Myth #3; Agro-fuels will bring rural development
In the tropics, 100 hectares dedicated to family farming generates thirty-five jobs. Oil palm and sugar cane provide 10 jobs, eucalyptus two, and soybeans a scant half-job per 100 hectares, all poorly paid. Until recently, agro-fuels supplied primarily local and sub-regional markets. Even in the U.S., most ethanol plants were relatively small, and farmer-owned. With the agro-fuels boom big industry is quickly moving in, centralizing operations and creating gargantuan economies of scale. Big Oil, Big Grain, and Big Genetic engineering are rapidly consolidating control over the entire agro-fuel value chain. The market power of these corporations is staggering: Cargill and ADM control 65 percent of the global grain trade, Monsanto and Syngenta a quarter of the $60 billion gene-tech industry. This market power allows these companies to extract profits from the most lucrative and low-risk segments of the value chain, e.g., inputs, processing and distribution. Agro-fuels producers will be increasingly dependent on a tightly-organized cabal of companies for their seed, inputs, services, processing and sale. They are not likely to receive many benefits.[7] More likely, smallholders will be forced out of the market and off the land. Hundreds of thousands have already been displaced by the soybean plantations in the “Republic of Soy” a 50+ million hectare area covering southern Brazil, northern Argentina, Paraguay, and eastern Bolivia.[8]
Myth #4: Agro-fuels will not cause hunger
Hunger, said Amartya Sen, results not from scarcity, but poverty. According to the FAO, there is enough food in the world to supply everyone with a daily 3,200-calorie diet of fresh fruit, nuts, vegetables, dairy and meat. Nonetheless, because they are poor, 824 million people continue to go hungry. In 2000, world leaders promised to halve the proportion of hungry people living in extreme poverty by 2015. Little progress has been made. The world's poorest people already spend 50-80% of their total household income on food. They suffer when high fuel prices push up food prices. Now, because food and fuel crops are competing over land and resources, high food prices may actually push up fuel prices. Both increase the prices of land and water. This perverse, inflationary spiral puts food and productive resources out of reach for the poor. The International Food Policy Research Institute has estimated that the price of basic food staples will increase 20-33 percent by the year 2010 and 26-135 percent by the year 2020. Caloric consumption typically declines as price rises by a ratio of 1:2. With every 1 percent rise in the cost of food, 16 million people are made food insecure. If current trends continue, some 1.2 billion people could be chronically hungry by 2025—600 million more than previously predicted.[9] World food aid will not likely come to the rescue because our surpluses will go to our gas tanks. Perversely, food aid only increases when food prices are low, not high. Instead of converting land to fuel production, what are urgently needed are massive transfers of food-producing resources to the rural poor.
Myth #5: Better “second-generation” agro-fuels are just around the corner
Proponents of agro-fuels like to reassure “food versus fuel” skeptics by asserting that present agro-fuels made from food crops will soon be replaced with environmentally-friendly crops like fast-growing trees and switchgrass. This myth, wryly referred to as the “bait and switch-grass” shell game, helps make first generation agro-fuels socially acceptable.
The agro-fuel transition transforms land use on massive scales, pitting food production against fuel production for land, water and resources. The issue of which crops are converted to fuel is irrelevant. Wild plants cultivated as fuel crops won’t have a smaller “environmental footprint” because commercialization will transform their ecology. They will rapidly migrate from hedgerows and woodlots onto arable lands to be intensively cultivated like any other industrial crop—with all the associated environmental externalities.
By genetically engineering plants with less lignin and cellulose, the industry aims to produce cellulosic agro-fuel crops that break down easily to liberate sugars, especially fast-growing trees. Trees are perennial and spread pollen father than food crops. Cellulosic candidates miscanthus, switch grass, and canary grass, are invasive species. Given the demonstrated promiscuity of genetically-engineered crops, we can expect massive genetic contamination. Monsanto and Syngenta will be quite pleased. Agro-fuels will serve as their genetic Trojan horse, allowing them to fully colonize both our fuel and food systems.
Any technology with potential to avoid the worst impacts of global warming must be commercially viable on a global scale within the next 5-8 years. This is highly unlikely with cellulosic ethanol, a product that has thus far demonstrated no carbon savings. Making it a green, viable product is not simply matter of scaling up existing technology, but of major breakthroughs in plant physiology that permit the economically efficient breakdown of cellulose, hemi-cellulose, and lignin. The agro-fuel industry is either betting on miracles or counting on taxpayer bail-outs. Faith in science is not science. Selective faith in second-generation fuel—rather than working to improve existing solar, wind, or conservation technologies—is bias in favor of the highest bidder.
The Twin is Dead, Long live the Twin
The International Energy Agency estimates that over the next 23 years, the world could produce as much as 147 million tons of agro-fuel. This will be accompanied by a lot of carbon, nitrous oxide, erosion, and over 2 billion tons of waste water. Remarkably, this fuel will barely offset the yearly increase in global oil demand, now standing at 136 million tons a year—never mind offsetting any of the existing demand. Is this worth it?
The agro-fuel transition closes a 200-year chapter in the relation between agriculture and industry that began with the Industrial Revolution. Then, the invention of the steam engine promised an end to drudgery. However, industry’s take-off lagged until governments privatized common lands, driving the poorest peasants out of agriculture and into urban factories. Peasant agriculture effectively subsidized industry with both cheap food and cheap labor. Over the next 100 years, as industry grew, so did the urban percentage of the world’s population: from 3% to 13%. Cheap oil and petroleum-based fertilizers opened up agriculture itself to industrial capital. Mechanization intensified production, keeping food prices low and industry booming. The next hundred years saw a three-fold global shift to urban living. Today, the world has as many people living in cities as in the countryside. [10] The massive transfer of wealth from agriculture to industry, the industrialization of agriculture, and the rural-urban shift are all part of the “Agrarian Transition,” the lesser-known twin of the Industrial Revolution. The Agrarian/Industrial twins transformed most of the world’s fuel and food systems and established non-renewable petroleum as the foundation of today’s multi-trillion dollar agri-foods complex.
The pillars of the agri-foods industry are the great grain corporations, e.g., ADM, Cargill and Bunge. They are surrounded by an equally formidable phalanx of food processors, distributors, and supermarket chains on one hand, and agro-chemical, seed, and machinery companies on the other. Together, these industries consume four of every five food dollars. For some time, the production side of the agri-foods complex has suffered from agricultural “involution” in which increasing rates of investment (chemical inputs, genetic engineering, and machinery) have not increased the rates of agricultural productivity—the agri-foods complex is paying more and reaping less.
Agro-fuels are the perfect answer to involution because they’re subsidized, grow as oil shrinks, and facilitate the concentration of market power in the hands of the most powerful players in the food and fuel industries. Like the original Agrarian Transition, the present Agro-fuels Transition will “enclose the commons” by industrializing the remaining forests and prairies of the world. It will drive the planet’s remaining smallholders, family farmers, and indigenous peoples to the cities. It will funnel rural resources to urban centers in the form of fuel, and will generate massive amounts of industrial wealth.
Unfortunately, the agro-fuels transition suffers from a congenital flaw: its fraternal twin is dead. There is no new Industrial Revolution. No expanding industrial sector waits to receive displaced indigenous communities, smallholders and rural workers. There are no production breakthroughs poised to flood the world with cheap food. This time, fuel will not subsidize agriculture with cheap energy. On the contrary, fuel will compete with food for land, water and resources. Agro-fuels collapse the industrial link between food and fuel. Taken to its extreme, agro-fuel will be used to grow agro-fuel—a thermodynamically pathetic proposition. The inherent entropy of industrial agriculture was invisible as long as oil was abundant. Now, food and fuel systems must shift from a savings to a checking account. Agro-fuels lead us to overdraw. “Renewable” does not mean “limitless.” Even if crops can be replanted, land, water, and nutrients are limiting. Pretending otherwise serves the interests of those monopolizing those resources.
Agro-fuel’s appeal lies with its potential to prolong the oil economy. With an estimated one trillion barrels of oil reserves left on the planet, $100-a-barrel oil is not far off.[11] The higher the oil prices, the more ethanol costs can rise while remaining competitive. Herein lays the contradiction for second generation agro-fuels: as oil becomes more expensive, first generation agro-fuels become more lucrative, discouraging the development of second-generation fuels. If oil reaches $80 per barrel, ethanol producers could afford to pay over $5 per bushel (~127 kg.) for corn, making it competitive with sugar cane as well. The planet’s energy crisis is potentially an $80—100 trillion dollar bonanza for food and fuel corporations. No wonder we are invited to consume our way out of over-consumption.
Limits—not incentives—must be placed on the agro-fuels industry. It is unconscionable for the North to shift the burden of over-consumption to the Global South simply because the tropics have more sunlight, rain and arable land. If agro-fuels are to be forest and food friendly, clearly the grain, cane, and oil-palm industries need to be regulated, and not in piecemeal fashion. Strong, enforceable standards based on limiting land planted to agro-fuels are urgently needed, as are anti-trust laws powerful enough to prevent the corporate concentration of market power in the industry. Sustainable benefits to the countryside will only accrue if agro-fuels are a complement to territorial plans for sustainable rural development, not the centerpiece.
Building Food and Fuel Sovereignty
The Agro-fuels Transition is not inevitable. There is no reason to sacrifice the possibility of sustainable, equitable food and fuel systems to an industrial strategy that compromises both. Many successful, locally-focused, energy-efficient and people-centered alternatives are presently producing food and fuel in ways that do not threaten food systems, the environment, or livelihoods. The question is not whether ethanol and bio-diesel per-se have a place in our future, but whether or not we allow a handful of global corporations to determine our future by dragging us down the dead end of the agro-fuels transition. To avoid this trap we have to abandon the cornucopian myths left over from the age of abundant oil. We must dare to envision a different, steady-state agrarian transition built on re-distributive land reform that re-populates and stabilizes the world’s struggling rural communities. We need to rebuild and strengthen our local food systems, and ensure conditions for the local re-investment of rural wealth. Putting people and environment—instead of corporate mega-profits—at the center of rural development requires food sovereignty: the right of people to determine their own food systems.
In both the Industrial North and the Global South, hundreds of thousands of producers and consumers are actively organizing for their right to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods. They are also re-building local food systems architecture to ensure that most of the wealth and benefits of food systems accrue locally—not in the distant corporate coffers of the agri-foods giants. They are holding agri-foods corporations accountable for the externalities that their industry imposes on taxpayers in the form of hunger, environmental destruction and poor health from cheap, processed foods. Social movements for land reform, indigenous rights, farmer-to-farmer sustainable agriculture, ethical trade, farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture, inner-city gardens and neighborhood-food systems development, are a few examples of the widespread, multi-faceted efforts for food sovereignty. Organizations like international Via Campesina, Brazil’s landless movement (MST), the Federation of Southern Cooperatives of African-American Farmers, and the Community Food Security Coalition, are transforming the social will from these rural and urban movements into political will—the formula for social change.
Food Sovereignty movements are already squaring off with the agro-fuels boom. When U.S. president George Bush arrived in Brazil to establish an ethanol partnership with Lula, 700 women from Via Campesina greeted him by occupying Cargill’s sugar mill in Sao Paulo in protest. But derailing the agro-fuels juggernaut entails changing the Agro-fuels Transition from an agrarian transition that favors industry to one that actually favors rural communities—a transition that does not drain wealth from the countryside, but that puts resources in the hands of rural peoples. This is a far-reaching project. A good nest step would be to launch a pro-active, global moratorium on the expansion of agro-fuels. Time and public debate is needed to assess the potential impacts of agro-fuels, and to develop the regulatory structures, programs, and incentives for conservation and food and fuel development alternatives. We need the time to forge a better transition—an agrarian transition to food and fuel sovereignty.
Eric Holt-Giménez, Ph.D., is Executive Director, Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy
NOTES
1.Delft Hydraulics in George Monbiot, “If we want to save the planet, we need a five-year freeze on biofuels” The Guardian, 3/27/2007
2. David Tilman and Jason Hill, Washington Post, 3/25/07
3. Miguel Altieri and Elizabeth Bravo, “The ecological and social tragedy of biofuels,” 5/1/07, www.foodfirst.org ,
4. Ecologist, May, 2007
5. Plano Nacional de Agroenergia 2006-2011, In Camila Moreno, “Agroenergia X Soberania Alimentar: a Questão Agrária do século XXI”, 2006
6.The Ecologist, Ibid
7. Annie Dufey, “International trade in biofuels: Good for development? And good for environment?” International Institute for Environment and Development, 2006.
8. Bravo, E. 2006, Biocombustibles, cutlivos energeticos y soberania alimentaria: encendiendo el debate sobre biocommustibles. Accion Ecologica, Quito, Ecuador
9. C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer, “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor”,
Foreign Affairs, May/June 2007
10. “The World Goes to Town,” The Economist, 5/11/07
11. Caroline Lucas Mep, et al “Fuelling a Food Crisis: The impact of peak oil on food security”, The Greens/European Free Alliance, European Parliament, 12/06
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"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. -- Edward R. Murrow
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
We Can’t Have Our Ethanol and Eat It Too — Fidel Castro on Biofuels
Fidel Castro here mostly quotes Atilio Borón, as he acknowledges in the opening graf. It’s a good summary of the biofuels scam and its terrifying implications. The fundamental points he states openly and with refreshing honesty: “a scenario is being prepared where a head-on confrontation will take place between the 800 million prosperous car owners and the food consumers… Transforming food into fuels is a monstrosity.” It’s a pity that most American readers are so terrified by, or conditioned into reflex hostility to, the name of Castro, that they would almost certainly be unable to assimilate any of the information in this article under this byline. Already there is a strong denial movement among rightwing Americans that denounces global climate change as a Leftist propaganda trick, etc. — how to get people past this ideological blinkering and in touch with basic physics, geology, and biology is a daunting problem.
REFLECTIONS BY THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF
THE DEBATE HEATS UP
Atilio Borón, a prestigious leftist intellectual who until recently headed the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), wrote an article for the 6th Hemispheric Meeting of Struggle against the FTAs and for the Integration of Peoples which just wrapped up in Havana; he was kind enough to send it to me along with a letter.
The gist of what he wrote I have summarized using exact quotes of paragraphs and phrases in his article; it reads as follows:
Pre-capitalist societies already knew about oil which surfaced in shallow deposits and they used for non-commercial purposes, such as waterproofing the wooden hulls of ships or in textile products, or for torches. Its original name was ‘petroleum’ or stone-oil.
By the end of the 19th century -after the discovery of large oilfields in Pennsylvania, United States, and the technological developments propelled by the massive use of the internal combustion engine– oil became the energy paradigm of the 20th century.
Energy is conceived of as just merchandise. Like Marx warned us, this is not due to the perversity or callousness of some individual capitalist or another, but rather the consequence of the logic of the accumulation process, which is prone to the ceaseless “mercantilism” that touches on all components of social life, both material and symbolic. The mercantilist process did not stop with the human being, but simultaneously extended to nature. The land and its products, the rivers and the mountains, the jungles and the forests became the target of its irrepressible pillage. Foodstuffs, of course, could not escape this hellish dynamic. Capitalism turns everything that crosses its path into merchandise.
Foodstuffs are transformed into fuels to make viable the irrationality of a civilization that, to sustain the wealth and privilege of a few, is brutally assaulting the environment and the ecologic conditions which made it possible for life to appear on Earth.
Transforming food into fuels is a monstrosity.
Capitalism is preparing to perpetrate a massive euthanasia on the poor, and particularly on the poor of the South, since it is there that the greatest reserves of the earth’s biomass required to produce biofuels are found. Regardless of numerous official statements assuring that this is not a choice between food and fuel, reality shows that this, and no other, is exactly the alternative: either the land is used to produce food or to produce biofuels.
The main lessons taught us by FAO data on the subject of agricultural land and the consumption of fertilizers are the following:
–Agricultural land per capita in developed capitalism almost doubles that existing in the underdeveloped periphery: 3.26 acres per person in the North as opposed to 1.6 in the South; this is explained by the simple fact that close to 80 percent of the world population live in the underdeveloped periphery.
–Brazil has slightly more agricultural land per capita than the developed countries. It becomes clear that this nation will have to assign huge tracts of its enormous land surface to meet the demands of the new energy paradigm.
–China and India have 1.05 and 0.43 acres per person respectively.
–The small nations of the Antilles, with their traditional one-crop agriculture, that is sugarcane, demonstrate eloquently its erosive effects exemplified by the extraordinary rate of consumption of fertilizers per acre needed to support this production. If in the peripheral countries the average figure is 109 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare (as opposed to 84 in developed countries), in Barbados the figure is 187.5, in Dominica 600, en Guadeloupe 1,016, in St. Lucia 1,325 and in Martinique 1,609. The use of fertilizers is tantamount to intensive oil consumption, and so the much touted advantage of agrifuels to reduce the consumption of hydrocarbons seems more an illusion than a reality.
The total agricultural land of the European Union is barely sufficient to cover 30 percent of their current needs for fuel but not their future needs that will probably be greater. In the United States, the satisfaction of their current demand for fossil fuels would require the use of 121 percent of all their agricultural land for agrifuels.
Consequently, the supply of agrifuels will have to come from the South, from capitalism’s poor and neocolonial periphery. Mathematics does not lie: neither the United States nor the European Union have available land to support an increase in food production and an expansion of the production of agrifuels at the same time.
Deforestation of the planet would increase the land surface suitable for agriculture (but only for a while). Therefore this would be only for a few decades, at the most. These lands would then suffer desertification and the situation would be worse than ever, aggravating even further the dilemma pitting the production of food against that of ethanol or biodiesel.
The struggle against hunger -and there are some 2 billion people who suffer from hunger in the world- will be seriously impaired by the expansion of land taken over by agrifuel crops. Countries where hunger is a universal scourge will bear witness to the rapid transformation of agriculture that would feed the insatiable demand for fuels needed by a civilization based on their irrational use. The only result possible is an increase in the cost of food and thus, the worsening of the social situation in the South countries.
Moreover, the world population grows 76 million people every year who will obviously demand food that will be steadily more expensive and farther out of their reach.
In The Globalist Perspective, Lester Brown predicted less than a year ago that automobiles would absorb the largest part of the increase in world grain production in 2006. Of the 20 million tons added to those existing in 2005, 14 million were used in the production of fuels, and only 6 million tons were used to satisfy the needs of the hungry. This author affirms that the world appetite for automobile fuel is insatiable. Brown concluded by saying that a scenario is being prepared where a head-on confrontation will take place between the 800 million prosperous car owners and the food consumers.
The devastating impact of increased food prices, which will inexorably happen as the land is used either for food or for fuel, was demonstrated in the work of C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer, two distinguished professors from the University of Minnesota, in an article published in the English language edition of the Foreign Affairs magazine whose title says it all: “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor”. The authors claim that in the United States the growth of the agrifuel industry has given rise to increases not only in the price of corn, oleaginous seeds and other grains, but also in the prices of apparently unrelated crops and products. The use of land to grow corn which will feed the faucets of ethanol is reducing the area for other crops. The food processors using crops such as peas and young corn have been forced to pay higher prices in order to ensure their supplies. This is a cost that will eventually be passed on to the consumer. The increase in food prices is also hitting the livestock and poultry industries. The higher costs have produced an abrupt decrease in income, especially in the poultry and pork sectors. If income continues to decrease, so will production, and the prices of chicken, turkey, pork, milk and eggs will increase. They warn that the most devastating effects of increasing food prices will be felt especially in Third World countries.
Studies made by the Belgian Office of Scientific Affairs shows that biodiesel causes more health and environmental hazards because it creates a more pulverized pollution and releases more pollutants that destroy the ozone layer.
With regards to the argument claming that the agrifuels are harmless, Victor Bronstein, a professor at the University of Buenos Aires, has demonstrated that:
–It is not true that biofuels are a renewable and constant energy source, given that the crucial factor in plant growth is not sunlight but the availability of water and suitable soil conditions. If this were not the case, we would be able to grow corn or sugarcane in the Sahara Desert. The effects of large-scale production of biofuels will be devastating.
–It is not true that they do not pollute. Even if ethanol produces less carbon emissions, the process to obtain it pollutes the surface and the water with nitrates, herbicides, pesticides and waste, and the air is polluted with aldehydes and alcohols that are carcinogens. The presumption of a “green and clean” fuel is a fallacy.
The proposal of agrifuels is unviable, and it is ethically and politically unacceptable. But it is not enough just to reject it. It is necessary to implement a new energy revolution, but one that is at the service of the people and not at the service of the monopolies and imperialism. This is, perhaps, the most important challenge of our time, concludes Atilio Borón.
As you can see, this summary took up some space. We need space and time; practically a book. It has been said that the masterpiece which made author Gabriel García Márquez famous, One Hundred Years of Solitude, required him to write fifty pages for each page that was printed. How much time would my poor pen need to refute those who for a material interest, ignorance, indifference or even for all three at the same time defend the evil idea and to spread the solid and honest arguments of those who struggle for the life of the species?
Some very important opinions and points of view were discussed at the Hemispheric Meeting in Havana. We should talk about those that brought us real-life images of cutting sugarcane by hand in a documentary film that seemed a reflection of Dante’s Inferno. A growing number of opinions are carried by the media every day and everywhere in the world, from institutions like the United Nations right up to national scientific associations. I simply perceive that the debate is heating up. The fact that the subject is being discussed is already an important step forward.
Fidel Castro Ruz
May 9, 2007, 5:47 p.m.
REFLECTIONS BY THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF
THE DEBATE HEATS UP
Atilio Borón, a prestigious leftist intellectual who until recently headed the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), wrote an article for the 6th Hemispheric Meeting of Struggle against the FTAs and for the Integration of Peoples which just wrapped up in Havana; he was kind enough to send it to me along with a letter.
The gist of what he wrote I have summarized using exact quotes of paragraphs and phrases in his article; it reads as follows:
Pre-capitalist societies already knew about oil which surfaced in shallow deposits and they used for non-commercial purposes, such as waterproofing the wooden hulls of ships or in textile products, or for torches. Its original name was ‘petroleum’ or stone-oil.
By the end of the 19th century -after the discovery of large oilfields in Pennsylvania, United States, and the technological developments propelled by the massive use of the internal combustion engine– oil became the energy paradigm of the 20th century.
Energy is conceived of as just merchandise. Like Marx warned us, this is not due to the perversity or callousness of some individual capitalist or another, but rather the consequence of the logic of the accumulation process, which is prone to the ceaseless “mercantilism” that touches on all components of social life, both material and symbolic. The mercantilist process did not stop with the human being, but simultaneously extended to nature. The land and its products, the rivers and the mountains, the jungles and the forests became the target of its irrepressible pillage. Foodstuffs, of course, could not escape this hellish dynamic. Capitalism turns everything that crosses its path into merchandise.
Foodstuffs are transformed into fuels to make viable the irrationality of a civilization that, to sustain the wealth and privilege of a few, is brutally assaulting the environment and the ecologic conditions which made it possible for life to appear on Earth.
Transforming food into fuels is a monstrosity.
Capitalism is preparing to perpetrate a massive euthanasia on the poor, and particularly on the poor of the South, since it is there that the greatest reserves of the earth’s biomass required to produce biofuels are found. Regardless of numerous official statements assuring that this is not a choice between food and fuel, reality shows that this, and no other, is exactly the alternative: either the land is used to produce food or to produce biofuels.
The main lessons taught us by FAO data on the subject of agricultural land and the consumption of fertilizers are the following:
–Agricultural land per capita in developed capitalism almost doubles that existing in the underdeveloped periphery: 3.26 acres per person in the North as opposed to 1.6 in the South; this is explained by the simple fact that close to 80 percent of the world population live in the underdeveloped periphery.
–Brazil has slightly more agricultural land per capita than the developed countries. It becomes clear that this nation will have to assign huge tracts of its enormous land surface to meet the demands of the new energy paradigm.
–China and India have 1.05 and 0.43 acres per person respectively.
–The small nations of the Antilles, with their traditional one-crop agriculture, that is sugarcane, demonstrate eloquently its erosive effects exemplified by the extraordinary rate of consumption of fertilizers per acre needed to support this production. If in the peripheral countries the average figure is 109 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare (as opposed to 84 in developed countries), in Barbados the figure is 187.5, in Dominica 600, en Guadeloupe 1,016, in St. Lucia 1,325 and in Martinique 1,609. The use of fertilizers is tantamount to intensive oil consumption, and so the much touted advantage of agrifuels to reduce the consumption of hydrocarbons seems more an illusion than a reality.
The total agricultural land of the European Union is barely sufficient to cover 30 percent of their current needs for fuel but not their future needs that will probably be greater. In the United States, the satisfaction of their current demand for fossil fuels would require the use of 121 percent of all their agricultural land for agrifuels.
Consequently, the supply of agrifuels will have to come from the South, from capitalism’s poor and neocolonial periphery. Mathematics does not lie: neither the United States nor the European Union have available land to support an increase in food production and an expansion of the production of agrifuels at the same time.
Deforestation of the planet would increase the land surface suitable for agriculture (but only for a while). Therefore this would be only for a few decades, at the most. These lands would then suffer desertification and the situation would be worse than ever, aggravating even further the dilemma pitting the production of food against that of ethanol or biodiesel.
The struggle against hunger -and there are some 2 billion people who suffer from hunger in the world- will be seriously impaired by the expansion of land taken over by agrifuel crops. Countries where hunger is a universal scourge will bear witness to the rapid transformation of agriculture that would feed the insatiable demand for fuels needed by a civilization based on their irrational use. The only result possible is an increase in the cost of food and thus, the worsening of the social situation in the South countries.
Moreover, the world population grows 76 million people every year who will obviously demand food that will be steadily more expensive and farther out of their reach.
In The Globalist Perspective, Lester Brown predicted less than a year ago that automobiles would absorb the largest part of the increase in world grain production in 2006. Of the 20 million tons added to those existing in 2005, 14 million were used in the production of fuels, and only 6 million tons were used to satisfy the needs of the hungry. This author affirms that the world appetite for automobile fuel is insatiable. Brown concluded by saying that a scenario is being prepared where a head-on confrontation will take place between the 800 million prosperous car owners and the food consumers.
The devastating impact of increased food prices, which will inexorably happen as the land is used either for food or for fuel, was demonstrated in the work of C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer, two distinguished professors from the University of Minnesota, in an article published in the English language edition of the Foreign Affairs magazine whose title says it all: “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor”. The authors claim that in the United States the growth of the agrifuel industry has given rise to increases not only in the price of corn, oleaginous seeds and other grains, but also in the prices of apparently unrelated crops and products. The use of land to grow corn which will feed the faucets of ethanol is reducing the area for other crops. The food processors using crops such as peas and young corn have been forced to pay higher prices in order to ensure their supplies. This is a cost that will eventually be passed on to the consumer. The increase in food prices is also hitting the livestock and poultry industries. The higher costs have produced an abrupt decrease in income, especially in the poultry and pork sectors. If income continues to decrease, so will production, and the prices of chicken, turkey, pork, milk and eggs will increase. They warn that the most devastating effects of increasing food prices will be felt especially in Third World countries.
Studies made by the Belgian Office of Scientific Affairs shows that biodiesel causes more health and environmental hazards because it creates a more pulverized pollution and releases more pollutants that destroy the ozone layer.
With regards to the argument claming that the agrifuels are harmless, Victor Bronstein, a professor at the University of Buenos Aires, has demonstrated that:
–It is not true that biofuels are a renewable and constant energy source, given that the crucial factor in plant growth is not sunlight but the availability of water and suitable soil conditions. If this were not the case, we would be able to grow corn or sugarcane in the Sahara Desert. The effects of large-scale production of biofuels will be devastating.
–It is not true that they do not pollute. Even if ethanol produces less carbon emissions, the process to obtain it pollutes the surface and the water with nitrates, herbicides, pesticides and waste, and the air is polluted with aldehydes and alcohols that are carcinogens. The presumption of a “green and clean” fuel is a fallacy.
The proposal of agrifuels is unviable, and it is ethically and politically unacceptable. But it is not enough just to reject it. It is necessary to implement a new energy revolution, but one that is at the service of the people and not at the service of the monopolies and imperialism. This is, perhaps, the most important challenge of our time, concludes Atilio Borón.
As you can see, this summary took up some space. We need space and time; practically a book. It has been said that the masterpiece which made author Gabriel García Márquez famous, One Hundred Years of Solitude, required him to write fifty pages for each page that was printed. How much time would my poor pen need to refute those who for a material interest, ignorance, indifference or even for all three at the same time defend the evil idea and to spread the solid and honest arguments of those who struggle for the life of the species?
Some very important opinions and points of view were discussed at the Hemispheric Meeting in Havana. We should talk about those that brought us real-life images of cutting sugarcane by hand in a documentary film that seemed a reflection of Dante’s Inferno. A growing number of opinions are carried by the media every day and everywhere in the world, from institutions like the United Nations right up to national scientific associations. I simply perceive that the debate is heating up. The fact that the subject is being discussed is already an important step forward.
Fidel Castro Ruz
May 9, 2007, 5:47 p.m.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Making Biofuels Without Wasting Food in Cuba and in Venezuela
By: Patricia Grogg - IPS
HAVANA, Mar 6 (IPS) - The governments of Cuba and Venezuela are planning to move forward together on biofuels production, but they will rely on producing alcohol from sugarcane, in order to spare food crops.
Official Cuban sources described the cooperative alcohol programme between the two countries as part of their "joint efforts" to protect the environment, reduce consumption of fossil fuels and promote alternative energy sources, while holding fast to the principle of not using edible crops to make fuels.
At present Venezuela imports Brazilian ethanol to mix with gasoline distributed in the eastern part of the country, in preference to methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE), an oxygenate additive which is a pollutant.
The Venezuelans "are planning to add eight percent ethanol to petrol in the first instance," said the head of the state Cuban Institute of Research on Sugarcane Derivatives, Luis Gálvez, on a television panel programme on alternative energy, in which experts warned that the rush to produce fuel alcohol could threaten food production.
Venezuela is planning to grow 276,000 hectares of sugarcane, to produce some 25,000 barrels per day (bpd) of fuel ethanol from bagasse, the plant matter left over after the sugar has been extracted.
Along with a wide range of cooperation projects totalling 1.5 billion dollars agreed on Feb. 28, the two governments signed an agreement to instal 11 ethanol plants in Venezuela and develop sugarcane production there.
On that occasion, Cuban Sugar Minister Ulises Rosales del Toro and Venezuelan Energy Minister Rafael Ramírez also signed contracts for supplying the first four plants, according to a detailed report published in the local daily Granma.
"Cuba is playing an important role, not only in supplying Venezuela through several of our sugar mills, but also with cooperation on technological aspects," Gálvez said.
The official defended alcohol production from sugarcane rather than from cereals like maize, which the United States uses as raw material for its entire ethanol consumption. The U.S. is the world's second largest producer of alcohol, after Brazil.
According to Gálvez, sugarcane is the best answer to three of humanity's pressing concerns, namely food, energy and the environment.
"Sugarcane production today is inevitably linked to alcohol and energy, for economic and market reasons," said Gálvez, citing Brazil, the world leader in producing fuel alcohol, as a prime example of "flexible production."
Expert sources consulted by IPS estimated that a ton of sugarcane bagasse can yield between 65 and 90 litres of alcohol. They emphasised that as the source is biomass, the fuel alcohol produced does not contribute to global warming.
Other experts participating in the forum on Cuban state television were insistent on the danger posed by the global biofuels fever to developing countries, as industrialised nations "talk of substituting one (energy) source for another, without changing their current patterns" of high consumption.
"What they are considering is a scheme in which most of the biofuels are produced in underdeveloped countries in Asia, Latin America or Africa, to be exported to the industrialised world," said Ramón Pichs, of the World Economy Research Centre (CIEM).
According to this model, developing countries would provide large areas of their cultivable land and cheap labour, and suffer a negative impact on food production and the environment, he said.
According to Pichs' calculations, filling a car's five-gallon tank with biofuel for two weeks would consume the amount of grain that would feed 26 people for a year.
The surge of interest in biofuels is caused by the drawbacks of using fossil fuels: high oil prices, their role in global warming, and their non-renewable nature as an energy source.
In 2002, Cuba restructured its sugar industry, closing down half of its 156 factories and cutting sugarcane cultivation. Now it is interested in manufacturing fuel alcohol, primarily for export.
It has therefore modernised at least 11 of its 17 distilleries, and intends to build seven new plants. These will be devoted to producing fuel grade dehydrated (anhydrous) ethanol, treated to remove the four percent of water contained in ordinary distilled alcohol.
The programme requires an investment of between 100 and 150 million dollars, and will increase ethanol production to about 500 million litres a year, from its current base of between 100 million and 150 million litres a year.
Cuba and Venezuela have close political and economic ties, and are promoting an integration strategy known as the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), which Bolivia joined in 2006, as did Nicaragua after Daniel Ortega became president on Jan. 10.
Under the terms of an energy agreement in force since 2000, Venezuela supplies Cuba with 93,000 to 100,000 bpd of oil, as well as technological support for developing oil and gas production on this Caribbean island.
After the meeting in Havana to assess the progress of a wide-ranging integrated cooperation agreement in force for over six years, the two countries agreed to stimulate development of new energy sources in Cuba and Venezuela that will also benefit "other sister nations."
Original source / relevant link:
Inter Press Service (IPS)
HAVANA, Mar 6 (IPS) - The governments of Cuba and Venezuela are planning to move forward together on biofuels production, but they will rely on producing alcohol from sugarcane, in order to spare food crops.
Official Cuban sources described the cooperative alcohol programme between the two countries as part of their "joint efforts" to protect the environment, reduce consumption of fossil fuels and promote alternative energy sources, while holding fast to the principle of not using edible crops to make fuels.
At present Venezuela imports Brazilian ethanol to mix with gasoline distributed in the eastern part of the country, in preference to methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE), an oxygenate additive which is a pollutant.
The Venezuelans "are planning to add eight percent ethanol to petrol in the first instance," said the head of the state Cuban Institute of Research on Sugarcane Derivatives, Luis Gálvez, on a television panel programme on alternative energy, in which experts warned that the rush to produce fuel alcohol could threaten food production.
Venezuela is planning to grow 276,000 hectares of sugarcane, to produce some 25,000 barrels per day (bpd) of fuel ethanol from bagasse, the plant matter left over after the sugar has been extracted.
Along with a wide range of cooperation projects totalling 1.5 billion dollars agreed on Feb. 28, the two governments signed an agreement to instal 11 ethanol plants in Venezuela and develop sugarcane production there.
On that occasion, Cuban Sugar Minister Ulises Rosales del Toro and Venezuelan Energy Minister Rafael Ramírez also signed contracts for supplying the first four plants, according to a detailed report published in the local daily Granma.
"Cuba is playing an important role, not only in supplying Venezuela through several of our sugar mills, but also with cooperation on technological aspects," Gálvez said.
The official defended alcohol production from sugarcane rather than from cereals like maize, which the United States uses as raw material for its entire ethanol consumption. The U.S. is the world's second largest producer of alcohol, after Brazil.
According to Gálvez, sugarcane is the best answer to three of humanity's pressing concerns, namely food, energy and the environment.
"Sugarcane production today is inevitably linked to alcohol and energy, for economic and market reasons," said Gálvez, citing Brazil, the world leader in producing fuel alcohol, as a prime example of "flexible production."
Expert sources consulted by IPS estimated that a ton of sugarcane bagasse can yield between 65 and 90 litres of alcohol. They emphasised that as the source is biomass, the fuel alcohol produced does not contribute to global warming.
Other experts participating in the forum on Cuban state television were insistent on the danger posed by the global biofuels fever to developing countries, as industrialised nations "talk of substituting one (energy) source for another, without changing their current patterns" of high consumption.
"What they are considering is a scheme in which most of the biofuels are produced in underdeveloped countries in Asia, Latin America or Africa, to be exported to the industrialised world," said Ramón Pichs, of the World Economy Research Centre (CIEM).
According to this model, developing countries would provide large areas of their cultivable land and cheap labour, and suffer a negative impact on food production and the environment, he said.
According to Pichs' calculations, filling a car's five-gallon tank with biofuel for two weeks would consume the amount of grain that would feed 26 people for a year.
The surge of interest in biofuels is caused by the drawbacks of using fossil fuels: high oil prices, their role in global warming, and their non-renewable nature as an energy source.
In 2002, Cuba restructured its sugar industry, closing down half of its 156 factories and cutting sugarcane cultivation. Now it is interested in manufacturing fuel alcohol, primarily for export.
It has therefore modernised at least 11 of its 17 distilleries, and intends to build seven new plants. These will be devoted to producing fuel grade dehydrated (anhydrous) ethanol, treated to remove the four percent of water contained in ordinary distilled alcohol.
The programme requires an investment of between 100 and 150 million dollars, and will increase ethanol production to about 500 million litres a year, from its current base of between 100 million and 150 million litres a year.
Cuba and Venezuela have close political and economic ties, and are promoting an integration strategy known as the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), which Bolivia joined in 2006, as did Nicaragua after Daniel Ortega became president on Jan. 10.
Under the terms of an energy agreement in force since 2000, Venezuela supplies Cuba with 93,000 to 100,000 bpd of oil, as well as technological support for developing oil and gas production on this Caribbean island.
After the meeting in Havana to assess the progress of a wide-ranging integrated cooperation agreement in force for over six years, the two countries agreed to stimulate development of new energy sources in Cuba and Venezuela that will also benefit "other sister nations."
Original source / relevant link:
Inter Press Service (IPS)
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