The ecological and social tragedy of crop-based biofuel production in the Americas

Miguel A Altieri
Professor of Agroecology
University of California, Berkeley

Elizabeth Bravo
Red por una América Latina Libre de Transgenicos
Quito, Ecuador

http://www.foodfirst.org/node/1662

The nations of the OECD—the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, who account for 56% of the planet’s energy consumption, are desperately in need of a liquid fuel replacement for oil. Worldwide petroleum extraction rates are expected to peak this year, and global supply will likely dwindle significantly in the next fifty years. There is also a great need to find substitutes for fossil fuels, which are one of the major contributors to global climate change through the emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

Biofuels have been promoted as a promising alternative to petroleum. Industry, government and scientific proponents of biofuels claim that they will serve as an alternative to peaking oil, mitigate climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, enhancing farmer incomes, and promoting rural development. But rigorous research and analysis conducted by respected ecologists and social scientists suggests that the large-scale industrial boom in biofuels will be disastrous for farmers, the environment, biodiversity preservation and consumers, particularly, the poor.

In this paper we address the ecological, social and economic implications of biofuel production. We argue that contrary to the false claims of corporations that promote these “green fuels,” the massive cultivation of corn, sugar cane, soybean, oil palm and other crops presently pushed by the fuel crops industry—all to be genetically engineered—will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but will displace tens of thousands of farmers, decrease food security in many countries, and accelerate the deforestation and environmental destruction of the Global South.

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The energy crisis—driven by over-consumption and peak oil—has provided an opportunity for powerful global partnerships between petroleum, grain, genetic engineering, and automotive corporations. These new food and fuel alliances are deciding the future of the world’s agricultural landscapes. The biofuels boom will further consolidate their hold over our food and fuel systems and allow them to determine what, how and how much will be grown, resulting in more rural poverty, environmental destruction and hunger. The ultimate beneficiaries of the biofuel revolution will be grain merchant giants, including Cargill, ADM and Bunge; petroleum companies such as BP, Shell, Chevron, Neste Oil, Repsol and Total; car companies such as General Motors, Volkswagen AG, FMC-Ford France, PSA Peugeot-Citroen and Renault; and biotech giants such as Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta.

The biotech industry is using the current biofuel fever to greenwash its image by developing and deploying transgenic seeds for energy, not food production. Given the increasing public mistrust for and rejection of transgenic crops as food, biotechnology will be used by corporations to improve their image claiming that they will develop new genetically modified crops with enhanced biomass production or that contain the enzyme alfa-amilase which will allow the ethanol process to begin while the corn is still in the field—a technology they claim has no negative impacts on human health. The deployment of such crops into the environment will add one more environmental threat to those already linked to GMO corn which in 2006 reached 32.2 million hectares: the introduction of new traits into the human food chain as has already occurred with Starlink corn and rice LL601.

As governments are persuaded by the promises of the global biofuel market, they devise national biofuel plans that will lock their agro-systems into production based on large scale, fuel monocultures, dependent upon intensive use of herbicides and chemical fertilizers, thus diverting millions of hectares of valuable cropland from much needed food production. There is a great need for social analysis to anticipate the food security and environmental implications of the unfolding biofuel plans of small countries such as Ecuador. This country expects to expand sugarcane production by 50,000 hectares, and to clear 100,000 hectares of natural forests to give way to oil palm plantations. Oil palm plantations are already causing major environmental disaster in the Choco region of Colombia (Bravo 2006).

Clearly, the ecosystems of areas in which biofuel crops are being produced are being rapidly degraded, and biofuel production is neither environmentally and socially sustainable now nor in the future.

It is also worrisome that public universities and research systems (i.e. the recent agreement signed by BP and the University of California-Berkeley) are falling prey to the seduction of big money and the influence of politics and corporate power. In addition to the implications of the intrusion of private capital on the shaping of the research agenda and faculty composition—that erodes the public mission of universities in favor of private interests—it serves as an attack against academic freedom and faculty governance. These partnerships divert universities from engaging in unbiased research and preclude intellectual capital from exploring truly sustainable alternatives to the energy crisis and climate change.

There is no doubt that the conglomeration of the petroleum and biotech capital will increasingly decide the fate of the rural landscapes of the Americas. Only strategic alliances and coordinated action of social movements (farmers organizations, environmental and farm labor movements, NGOs, consumer lobbies, committed members of the academic sector, etc) can put pressure on governments and multinational companies to ensure that these trends are halted. More importantly, we need to work together to ensure that all countries retain the right to achieve food sovereignty via agroecologically-based, local food production systems, land reform, access to water, seeds and other resources and domestic farm and food policies that respond to the true needs of farmers and all consumers, especially the poor.