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TechnoratiThe Western Appetite for Biofuels Is Causing Starvation in the Poor World
Developing nations are being pushed to grow crops for ethanol, rather than food - all thanks to political expediency
It doesn't get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava. The government has allocated several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the district of Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought. It would surely be quicker and more humane to refine the Swazi people and put them in our tanks. Doubtless a team of development consultants is already doing the sums.
This is one of many examples of a trade that was described last month by Jean Ziegler, the UN's special rapporteur, as "a crime against humanity". Ziegler took up the call first made by this column for a five-year moratorium on all government targets and incentives for biofuel: the trade should be frozen until second-generation fuels - made from wood or straw or waste - become commercially available. Otherwise, the superior purchasing power of drivers in the rich world means that they will snatch food from people's mouths. Run your car on virgin biofuel, and other people will starve.
Even the International Monetary Fund, always ready to immolate the poor on the altar of business, now warns that using food to produce biofuels "might further strain already tight supplies of arable land and water all over the world, thereby pushing food prices up even further". This week, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation will announce the lowest global food reserves in 25 years, threatening what it calls "a very serious crisis". Even when the price of food was low, 850 million people went hungry because they could not afford to buy it. With every increment in the price of flour or grain, several million more are pushed below the breadline.
The cost of rice has risen by 20% over the past year, maize by 50%, wheat by 100%. Biofuels aren't entirely to blame - by taking land out of food production they exacerbate the effects of bad harvests and rising demand - but almost all the major agencies are now warning against expansion. And almost all the major governments are ignoring them.
They turn away because biofuels offer a means of avoiding hard political choices. They create the impression that governments can cut carbon emissions and - as Ruth Kelly, the British transport secretary, announced last week - keep expanding the transport networks. New figures show that British drivers puttered past the 500bn kilometre mark for the first time last year. But it doesn't matter: we just have to change the fuel we use. No one has to be confronted. The demands of the motoring lobby and the business groups clamouring for new infrastructure can be met. The people being pushed off their land remain unheard.
In principle, burning biofuels merely releases the carbon the crops accumulated when growing. Even when you take into account the energy costs of harvesting, refining and transporting the fuel, they produce less net carbon than petroleum products. The law the British government passed a fortnight ago - by 2010, 5% of our road transport fuel must come from crops - will, it claims, save between 700,000 and 800,000 tonnes of carbon a year. It derives this figure by framing the question carefully. If you count only the immediate carbon costs of planting and processing biofuels, they appear to reduce greenhouse gases. When you look at the total impacts, you find they cause more warming than petroleum.
A recent study by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen shows that the official estimates have ignored the contribution of nitrogen fertilisers. They generate a greenhouse gas - nitrous oxide - that is 296 times as powerful as CO2. These emissions alone ensure that ethanol from maize causes between 0.9 and 1.5 times as much warming as petrol, while rapeseed oil (the source of more than 80% of the world's biodiesel) generates 1-1.7 times the impact of diesel. This is before you account for the changes in land use.
A paper published in the journal Science three months ago suggests that protecting uncultivated land saves, over 30 years, between two and nine times the carbon emissions you might avoid by ploughing it and planting biofuels. Last year the research group LMC International estimated that if the British and European target of a 5% contribution from biofuels were to be adopted by the rest of the world, the global acreage of cultivated land would expand by 15%. That means the end of most tropical forests. It might also cause runaway climate change.
The British government says it will strive to ensure that "only the most sustainable biofuels" will be used in the UK. It has no means of enforcing this aim - it admits that if it tried to impose a binding standard it would break world trade rules. But even if "sustainability" could be enforced, what exactly does it mean? You could, for example, ban palm oil from new plantations. This is the most destructive kind of biofuel, driving deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia. But the ban would change nothing. As Carl Bek-Nielsen, vice chairman of Malaysia's United Plantations Berhad, remarked: "Even if it is another oil that goes into biodiesel, that other oil then needs to be replaced. Either way, there's going to be a vacuum and palm oil can fill that vacuum." The knock-on effects cause the destruction you are trying to avoid. The only sustainable biofuel is recycled waste oil, but the available volumes are tiny.
At this point, the biofuels industry starts shouting "jatropha". It is not yet a swear word, but it soon will be. Jatropha is a tough weed with oily seeds that grows in the tropics. This summer Bob Geldof, who never misses an opportunity to promote simplistic solutions to complex problems, arrived in Swaziland in the role of "special adviser" to a biofuels firm. Because it can grow on marginal land, jatropha, he claimed, is a "life-changing" plant that will offer jobs, cash crops and economic power to African smallholders.
Yes, it can grow on poor land and be cultivated by smallholders. But it can also grow on fertile land and be cultivated by largeholders. If there is one blindingly obvious fact about biofuel, it's that it is not a smallholder crop. It is an internationally traded commodity that travels well and can be stored indefinitely, with no premium for local or organic produce. Already the Indian government is planning 14m hectares of jatropha plantations. In August, the first riots took place among the peasant farmers being driven off the land to make way for them.
If the governments promoting biofuels do not reverse their policies, the humanitarian impact will be greater than that of the Iraq war. Millions will be displaced, hundreds of millions more could go hungry. This crime against humanity is a complex one, but that neither lessens nor excuses it. If people starve because of biofuels, Ruth Kelly and her peers will have killed them. Like all such crimes, it is perpetrated by cowards, attacking the weak to avoid confronting the strong.
George Monbiot is the author of the best selling books The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a new world order and Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper.
© 2007 The Guardian
19 Comments so far
Show AllAnything, anything to avoid people from changing their lifestyle habits. And anything to keep fuel a prime economic industry for vehicles. Zero-emission cars... not enough profit!
Sacrifice... who, me? Who, us humans?
The idea that we can switch to biofuels to keep our cars on the road whilst mitigating climate change is the latest in a long string of incredibly stupid energy decisions.
The intent should be to utilize a resource upon which the lives of countless millions do not depend for food. Anything else is insanity, given current trends in population growth and climate-induced water and cropland shortages.
We need to get away from the idea of liquid-fueled vehicles altogether and convert to an electric-vehicle society. This of course leads to the question of what to fuel the electrical-generating power plants with. For a pittance compared with the amount we are spending in Iraq attempting to secure all the oil supplies for ourselves, we could instead be funding the construction of huge wind installations in the midwest and solar installations in the southwest.
Another thing I've been looking at is the utilization of otherwise unused waste land for a biofuel crop that doesn't have the negatives associated with those in current use. This crop, believe it or not, is tumbleweeds (russian thistle). The University of Arizona did studies on its use as a raw material to be used in the manufacturing presto logs. There are a lot of advantages to this as an energy crop. It has the per-lb energy equivalent of lignite coal, it requires no additional water, above that provided by rainfall (although yield can be increased with added water), no fertilizers, and no pesticides. It even harvests and re-seeds itself, with the help of the wind. It is also carbon-neutral, in that the CO2 produced through its burning is recovered by incorporation into the next crop.
All that is required is to construct collection points and wait for the weeds to come to you. You could even go one step further and make the collection/processing facility wind powered as well, making the whole cycle entirely self-sustaining. After all, the tumbleweeds tumble when the wind blows, so why not utilize that same wind to run the collector/processor? And any power not used by the facility can be sold to the utilities to recoup expenses.
And the weeds need not be used just as presto logs. They could be formed into pellet fuel, or crushed to powder to be burned in a boiler to generate electricity to run all those electric cars I mentioned earlier.
All this can be done without sacrificing a single acre of valuable cropland. The weeds grow on semiarid waste lands all over the west. All we need to do is gather them. Someone really should look into this. This is the type of program we need to be pursuing - utilizing the renewable, environmentally friendly resources that are available all around us, but which are just waiting for someone to develop a system to make them viable. Incidentally, I have a tenative design for a collector/processor if anyone is interested.
Yeah, but some of us are not content to wait until that mafia scum which runs the place ruins it for everyone before we act. Sacrifices have to be made if the system is to be changed and, personally, I have many nieces and nephews who I believe deserve a life as fulfilling, healthy and rewarding as the children of Cuba. And to allow the circumstances for such a glorious prospect to mature you can be sure that the evil scumbags which currently regulate most of the global economy must be removed from their positions by whatever means necessary.
We could have fed millions of people, if that is our aim, with the trillion dollars wasted in Iraq blowing their country to bits and killing hundreds of thousands. Many in our country were quick to embrace that as a good idea and many still do, so are we much concerned with others or not? A good sign would be to park the giant SUVs and carpool, use mass transit and drive economic vehicles. There are many reasons for people to be starving besides the production of ethanol using food grains which will no doubt run it`s course but that takes some time to make happen. Since humans are controlling the world, it always has, and will continue to be, an imperfect place that we have to continue to work on as best we can.
Get a horse.
No, really. Get a horse.
At least you can eat it.
That's a specious argument. If there were no hungry people in the world and our atmosphere was healthy you might get away with that corporate apology, but reality requires real solutions. The most critical factor in our current predicament is the amount of oxygen in our atmosphere and not which fuel we can use in our sports car which can drive several times faster than legally permitted. The calculation which needs to be made is how much oxygen do we use in a day and how much oxygen is the biomass producing in a day. Until we are producing a substantial oxygen surplus we are never going to see the holes in the ozone layer close. If we can't close the holes in the ozone layer then the planet's weather will continue to experience the shift to the extreme disturbances due to higher moisture content.
The oxygen content of the atmosphere is the most pressing issue facing life on this planet right now and everything else should take a backseat to that top priority. Because the increase in photons entering our atmosphere causes the amount of moisture in the atmosphere to increase at an exponential rate, we don't have near as much time to get our environment fixed as the shills for the government would have you believe.
The best way to appreciate Monbiot's analytical short commings here is to start with his scientifically challenged views on human forced global warming as debated by Alexander Cockburn. The same type of ideologically overgeneralized simplification is seen in his views here on biofuels. What he doesn't have is a better solution to the real and current problem of cartel controled fossil fuels today. Ethanol is an immediate improvement, if not a long term solution, and his worse case scenarios do not necessarily follow with proper regulations, and such problems currently do not exist. Bio-Diesel is a more futuristic solution when more than 5% of the vehicals are so propelled, and ultimately Hybrids or electrics will take over. Right now blocking clean, renewable alcohol fuels makes one as big a part of the problem as the oil companies, who happen to be engaged in the same activity at the distribution level.
Bio-fuels may have a small part to play in our energy production, however, our rush to corn-based ethonal and soy-based bio-diesel have major limitations, and are pushing our nation into increasingly dangerous farming practice. More important however, than the actual small percentage of crops devoted to fuel production, is our increasing loss of diversity in agriculture. The genitic diviserty of our seed pool is alarminngly small, and few farmers are directly involved in production of food for human consumption, aside from the oils, fats, and sugars from corn and beens. Indeed, as we turn to imports of our basic staples, we place a great strain on many nations food supplies, and for their poor the porblem is rapidly turning into a crisis. Aditionally, when corn is used for fuel, production gains become more important as the prpice rises, therefore crops are planted more heavily, fertilizer ammounts increased, and additional chemicals used to control weeds. Baring drought yields increase, profits rise, and water supplies are depleted. It's timie to find better alternatives
Don't you all get it? This is Big Oil propaganda.
How many people in the third world have been living off the corn and soybeans of the US? Anyone got any hard statistics? What ethanol is doing is using corn that would ordinarily be used to fatten Americans into obesity with corn syrup! As for bio-diesel, it is a potential long-term replacement for petroleum altogether.
The thing is, that it's not just the foreigners who will be starving if that macabre waste of farmland ever gets into high gear so that they can produce a significant amount of fuel. There are already a million or so people who live on the streets in North America and I'm quite sure that most of them don't eat regularly. But that is probably factored into the plan so that they can eventually get rid of all of the undesirables on the planet.
Luckily for us the news isn't all bad, since it's fortunate for us that we have a decent model to emulate for when the capitalist system crashes. Jean Ziegler, the special envoy for the UN for the Right to Food is in Cuba and stressed that Cuba is a model for the world in guaranteeing the right to food for all of it's citizens. And not only that, but he said that Cuba is the only nation which has met the Development Goals of the Millennium, so it would appear that the Cuban system is the one which most countries should try to emulate.
Oh come on. It's not as if the lives of millions of foreigners are more important than Americans being able to drive their Hummers to the grocery store five minutes' walk away. Let's get our priorities straight.
Anyone that thinks using crops for biofuels is any less a crime than gassing people and then cooking them in ovens doesn't understand reality. The rate that Nature is beginning to pummel the large food producing regions is indicative that the idea of biofuels may meet an inglorious end in the near future. For instance, the harvest just finished in Australia for wheat was down 42% from forecast at the beginning of harvest, and that forecast was low due to Australia being five years into a drought. The other major growing areas also suffered poor harvests, from the Ukraine, to Canada, to Brasil. Overall the harvest was down in the neighborhood of 25% and that was in spite of 1.3 million acres extra that was planted due to the poor crop yield in 2006. Right now it appears that the U.S. is entering into a drought situation similar to the one afflicting Australia, where some areas have planted nothing and some towns have closed because there is no water. To utilize biofuels is to be complicit in a crime just as much as being the driver of a gettaway car for bank robbers is a crime.
The article would have been accurate except that he BLATANTLY omitted the fact that the sole biofuel that requires NOT A SINGLE DROP OF PETROLEUM is HEMP. Tragically, it was banned by the very same vested interests who POVERTIZED this planet SEVERELY in the first place. The Left will NEVER learn to listen to real solutions but continues to sink to the rightwing levels of crying "victimization" and "doom and gloom" with no solutions. True, most biofuels are disadvantageous because they require more petroleum to yield anything but not all biofuels are equal. Get a real education in biology before badmouthing biofuels across the board.
Thank you Mr. Monbiot for your investigative reporting.
When British Petroleum changed it's name to Beyond Petroleum and created a green marketing campain with a new green and yellow floral sunburst emblem to show their more "earth friendly" image , I got suspitious. It takes land to grow the crops and it takes fossilfuels to process the Biofeuls...what a lucky break for one of the world's most notorious profiteers and poluters to get a second chance to plunder, exploit and, again, with immunity, put profits above people and the planet!
And when militaries all over the world are requiring more and more oil to keep up with the "War on Terrorism"...we know who profits from that...and we know who pays for it with their money and/or lives. Will the military industrial complex convert to Biofuels?
So we must watch out for the dubious motives and players in the rush to "save the planet" and "go beyond petroleum". There are very real power brokers trying to cash in on the environment and climate of fear, and again I see an example of "disaster capitalism" at work... and that is the warning I hear from Mr. Monbiot in this article.
Monbiot's case against biofuels is that the poltical economics of producing them may result in people being pushed off the land or priced out of food they need.
This is not a case against biofuels, but against the political economy of the present global system.
The point that current corn ethanol production methods are inefficient and may even be net negatives on climate change is spurious when used as a general argument against biofuels including more efficient crops and methods such as switchgrass and jatropha.
Biofuels can make a contribution to cutting greenhouse gases and cushioning the blow of the oil peak. Monbiot points to possible secondary effects which could affect large numbers of the poor. Those issues should be addressed directly, not as a broad "thumbs-down" to biofuels technology.
Mr. Monbiot's passion is sadly misplaced in this area. The growing demand for cheap, imported biofuels certainly is a problem, but it is not a root problem. Demand from developed countries for their own food, pulp, and other raw materials are all part of the same problem, which is we have an economic system which is based on the rich expoloiting the poor. It is also oversimplistic to say that biofuel production eliminates agricultural lands or that it makes food less affordable for poor people. People with no money and no land cannot afford to buy food no matter what cost it is; yet often times having a cash crop available gives them enough to buy food or, more importantly, retain small parcels of land on which they can continue to farm.
The problem is economics, and without biofuels the same trends will continue, unless we restructure the global economy.
Bio-fuels... sounded really great at first- until one considered full implications. We were ready to hop on that bandwagon, thought about it some more, then realized it was no answer, would turn crops into the hot resources they've become; however, we didn't see the negatives aspects as occurring so soon, as in the situation in Swaziland, and also as Brazil and Mexico, among others. It's a nightmare. And we still don't have enough rich (and cool)investors interested in putting their money into sustainable technologies research which could really help an imperiled planet and its inhabitants. Seems greed really is a disease, and an apparently unending, raging, incurable, epedimic.
And once the US builds more nuclear power plants they can dump the waste in those same nations.
Simply put, the production of biofuels destroys agricultural lands and is not a solution to the PetroCollapse at all.