The tide turns against biofuels

TheRealNews, April 24, 2008

As biofuel production booms, concerns grow about food supply.

Biofuels Starving Our People, Leaders Tell UN

By Allegra Stratton, CommonDreams.org

The leaders of Bolivia and Peru have attacked the use of biofuels, saying they have made food too expensive for the poor.

Speaking at the United Nations, the Bolivian president, Evo Morales, said the increased use of farmland for fuel crops was causing a “tremendous increase” in food prices.

The Reuters news agency reported that the Peruvian president, Alan Garcia, called on developed countries to grow more food. In the last few months, food prices in Peru have run ahead of the country’s general rate of inflation.

Watch a video from TheRealNews: Morales calls for ‘reparations to the earth’

Their attack coincided with a report published today by the environmental group Friends of the Earth warning the EU of the perils of expanding biofuel use in Latin America. Last year the EU agreed on a target of 10% biofuel use for transport by 2020.

Watch another video from TheRealNews: The tide turns against biofuels

The report says the certification schemes being set up by some South American countries to ensure sustainable production of sugar cane and soya bean crops are not enough to prevent damage to the environment and “fail to address the biggest problems” caused by the cultivation of land currently covered by forests or smaller farms.

In his UN comments, Morales criticised “some South American presidents” for pushing biofuels. The Bolivian president did not name them but his views are in sharp contrast to those of the Brazilian president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has said developing countries have enough land to produce both food and biofuels.

Morales called on developed nations to accept that problems created by biofuels in developing countries were partly their responsibility. After his speech, he told a news conference that “it is not an internal problem, it is an external problem”.

“This is very serious,” he said. “How important is life and how important are cars? So I say life first and cars second.”

In his UN speech, Morales called for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to take action against the biofuel industry “in order to avoid hunger and misery among our people”.

Reuters reported Garcia as saying biofuels were “creating very serious problems for countries that have to import these (food) products. We believe there are alternative energies that do not put the world’s food in danger.”

Peru’s government has been forced to hand out food to the poorest in the country’s capital, Lima, because of the crisis caused by rising food prices. It has cut tariffs and raised interest rates to try to curb inflation, which rose 4% last year.

Both leaders are facing challenges to their authority. This month, Garcia’s approval rating sank to 26% - the lowest since he took office in 2006 - and 57% of those polled said rising prices was the main reason for their disapproval.

Morales, meanwhile, is fighting opposition leaders in four eastern provinces who want significant autonomy from the central government.

 

Will Capitalism Survive Climate Change?

By Walden Bello*, Focus on the Global South, April 2008

THERE is now a solid consensus in the scientific community that if the change in global mean temperature in the twenty-first century exceeds 2.4 degrees Celsius, changes in the planet’s climate will be large-scale, irreversible, and disastrous. Moreover, the window of opportunity for action that will make a difference is narrow — that is, the next 10 to 15 years.

Throughout the North, however, there is strong resistance to changing the systems of consumption and production that have created the problem in the first place and a preference for “techno-fixes,” such as “clean” coal, carbon sequestration and storage, industrial-scale biofuels, and nuclear energy.

Globally, transnational corporations and other private actors resist government-imposed measures such as mandatory caps, preferring to use market mechanisms like the buying and selling of “carbon credits,” which critics says simply amounts to a license for corporate polluters to keep on polluting.

In the South, there is little willingness on the part of Southern elites to depart from the high-growth, high-consumption model inherited from the North, and a self-interested conviction that the North must first adjust and bear the brunt of adjustment before the South takes any serious step towards limiting its greenhouse gas emissions.

Contours of the Challenge
In the climate change discussions, the principle of “common but differentiated responsibility” is recognized by all parties, meaning that the global North must shoulder the brunt of the adjustment to the climate crisis since it is the one whose economic trajectory has brought it about. It is also recognized that the global response should not compromise the right to develop of the countries of the global South

The devil, however, is in the detail. As Martin Khor of Third World Network has pointed out, the global reduction of 80 per cent in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2050 that many now recognize as a necessary, will have to translate into reductions of at least 150 to 200 per cent on the part of the global North if the two principles — “common but differentiated responsibility” and recognition of the right to development of the countries of the South — are to be followed. But are the governments and people of the North prepared to make such commitments?

Psychologically and politically, it is doubtful that the North at this point has what it takes to meet the problem head-on. The prevailing assumption is that the affluent societies can take on commitments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions but still grow and enjoy their high standards of living if they shift to non-fossil fuel energy sources. Moreover, how the mandatory cuts agreed multilaterally by governments get implemented within the country must be market-based, that is, on the trading of emission permits. The subtext is: techno-fixes and the carbon market will make the transition relatively painless and — why not? — profitable, too.

There is, however, a growing realization that many of these technologies are decades away from viable use and that, in the short and medium term, relying on a shift in energy dependence to non-fossil fuel alternatives will not be able to support current rates of economic growth. Also, it is increasingly evident that the trade-off for more cropland being devoted to biofuel production is less land to grow food and greater food insecurity globally.

It is rapidly becoming clear that the dominant paradigm of economic growth is one of the most significant obstacles to a serious global effort to deal with climate change. But this destabilizing, fundamentalist growth-consumption paradigm is itself more effect rather than cause.

The central problem, it is becoming increasingly clear, is a mode of production whose main dynamic is the transformation of living nature into dead commodities, creating tremendous waste in the process. The driver of this process is consumption - or more appropriately overconsumption - and the motivation is profit or capital accumulation: Capitalism, in short.

It has been the generalization of this mode of production in the North and its spread from the North to the South over the last 300 years that has caused the accelerated burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil and rapid deforestation, two of the key man-made processes behind global warming.

The South’s Dilemma
One way of viewing global warning is to see it as a key manifestation of the latest stage of a wrenching historical process: the privatization of the global commons by capital. The climate crisis must thus be seen as the expropriation by the advanced capitalist societies of the ecological space of less developed or marginalized societies.

This leads us to the dilemma of the South: Before the full extent of the ecological destabilization brought about by capitalism, it was expected that the South would simply follow the “stages of growth” of the North. Now it is impossible to do so without bringing about ecological Armageddon. Already, China is on track to overtake the US as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and yet the elite of China as well as those of India and other rapidly developing countries are intent on reproducing the American-type overconsumption-driven capitalism.

Thus, for the South, the implications of an effective global response to global warming include not just the inclusion of some countries in a regime of mandatory reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, although this is critical: in the current round of climate negotiations, for instance, China, can no longer opt out of a mandatory regime on the ground that it is a developing country.

Nor can the challenge to most of the other developing countries be limited to that of getting the North to transfer technology to mitigate global warming and provide funds to assist them in adapting to it, as many of them appeared to think during the Bali negotiations.

These steps are important, but they should be seen as but the initial steps in a broader, global reorientation of the paradigm for achieving economic well being. While the adjustment will need to be much, much greater and faster in the North, the adjustment for the South will essentially be the same: a break with the high-growth, high-consumption model in favor of another model of achieving the common welfare

In contrast to the Northern elites’ strategy of trying to decouple growth from energy use, a progressive comprehensive climate strategy in both the North and the South must be to reduce growth and energy use while raising the quality of life of the broad masses of people. Among other things, this will mean placing economic justice and equality at the center of the new paradigm.

The transition must be one not only from a fossil-fuel based economy but also from an overconsumption-driven economy. The end-goal must be adoption of a low-consumption, low-growth, high-equity development model that results in an improvement in people’s welfare, a better quality of life for all, and greater democratic control of production.

It is unlikely that the elites of the North and the South will agree to such a comprehensive response. The farthest they are likely to go is for techno-fixes and a market-based cap-and-trade system. Growth will be sacrosanct, as will the system of global capitalism.

Yet, confronted with the Apocalypse, humanity cannot self-destruct. It may be a difficult road, but we can be sure that the vast majority will not commit social and ecological suicide to enable the minority to preserve their privileges. However it is achieved, a thorough reorganization of production, consumption, and distribution will be the end result of humanity’s response to the climate emergency and the broader environmental crisis.

Threat and Opportunity
In this regard, climate change is both a threat and an opportunity to bring about the long postponed social and economic reforms that had been derailed or sabotaged in previous eras by elites seeking to preserve or increase their privileges. The difference is that today the very existence of humanity and the planet depend on the institutionalization of economic systems based not on feudal rent extraction or capital accumulation or class exploitation but on justice and equality.

The question is often asked these days if humanity will be able to get its act together to formulate an effective response to climate change. Though there is no certainty in a world filled with contingency, I am hopeful that it will. In the social and economic system that will be collectively crafted, I anticipate that there will be room for the market. However, the more interesting question is: will it have room for capitalism? Will capitalism as a system of production, consumption, and distribution survive the challenge of coming up with an effective solution to the climate crisis?

 *Senior Analyst at Focus in the Global South, a program of the Chulalongkorn University Social Research Institute.

News and Update: UN rapporteur calls for biofuel moratorium

Download the statement of Special Rapporteur Jean Ziegler as PDF: therighttofood.pdf

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food is demanding an international five-year ban on producing biofuels to combat soaring food prices.

Switzerland’s Jean Ziegler said the conversion of arable land for plants used for green fuel had led to an explosion of agricultural prices which was punishing poor countries forced to import their food at a greater cost. “232kg of corn is needed to make 50 litres of bioethanol,” Ziegler said on Thursday. “A child could live on that amount of corn for a year.”

Using land for biofuels would result in “massacres”, he said, predicting a reduction in the amount of food aid sent to developing countries by richer ones.

“It’s a total disaster for those who are starving.”

Ziegler’s proposal for a five-year moratorium, which he plans to submit to the UN General Assembly on October 25, is aiming to ban the conversion of land for the production of biofuels.

Ziegler said he hoped that by the time the moratorium was lifted science would have made sufficient progress to be able to create “second generation” biofuels, made from agricultural waste or from non-agricultural plants such as jatropha, which grows naturally on arid ground.

Taking Brazil as an example, Ziegler said he deplored the fact that sugar cane plantations, whose products were used for biofuels, were spreading at the expense of food-producing land.

He said ten hectares (100,000 square metres) of food-producing land could sustain an average of seven to ten farmers, whereas the same area could only produce enough sugar cane for one farmer.

Jean Ziegler

Threat to poor

Only two years ago, with the twin spectres of peak oil prices and climate change looming, biofuels seemed the ideal alternative energy.

Now it is the poor who have to contend with the flip side of biofuels: spiralling cereal prices, say experts.

“The days of cheap food are over,” said Joachim von Braun, director of the International Food Policy Research Institute, in an article for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) in September.

Over the past decade, while production of biofuels using corn, sugarcane, soybean and other staples has risen dramatically, malnutrition has continued. Nearly 900 million people worldwide suffer hunger, 70 per cent of them food producers, peasants and rural dwellers.

Von Braun warns this figure could hit one billion in just a few years and that rising demand and increased bioenergy costs are affecting food prices.

“The bioenergy market receives considerable state funding and is dominated by the heavyweights in the oil, cereal and automobile industry,” he said.

“Barring technological progress and enactment of regulations based on transparent standards, we are looking at a 20-40 per cent increase in food prices between now and 2020. And the poorest, some of whom live on 50 cents a day, will be unable to foot the bill.”

Environmental impact

A study commissioned by the Swiss authorities in May also concluded that biofuels might not be the panacea for the world’s fossil-fuel woes.

Such fuels, touted as an ecologically friendly source of energy, might be more harmful for the environment than their fossil counterparts, it said.

According to the authors, while it was true that biofuels might emit less greenhouse gases than fossil fuels when consumed, producing them was generally more stressful on the environment.

Growing and processing crops for energy purposes or feedstock can have the heaviest environmental impact, as soil quality can be affected adversely, for example through fertiliser overuse.