Biodiversity, rights and livelihood – Agrofuels special issue

Jul 2007

In this article, a closer look is taken at the way corporations are using the stampede into agrofuels to extend their takeover of world farming. An unparalleled process of mergers, takeovers and alliances is tightening the grip of a relatively small group of huge interlinked agro-industrial groups. Many analysts believe that the market is heading for a crisis of over-production. Once the bubble has burst, only the most powerful groups will remain, thus furthering the process of concentration.
Another article focuses on the situation in different parts of the world: Latin America, Asia and Africa. The conclusion is pretty much the same across the board: the push for agrofuels amounts to nothing less than the re-introduction and re-enforcement of the old colonial plantation economy, redesigned to function under the rules of the modern neoliberal, globalised world. Indigenous farming systems, local communities and the biodiversity they manage have to give way to provide for the increased fuel needs of the industrialised world.
The justification for the large-scale cultivation of agrofuels is the need to combat climate change, but the figures make a mockery of this claim. According to the US government, global energy consumption is set to increase 71 percent between 2003 and 2030, and most of that will come from burning more oil, coal and natural gas. By the end of this period, all renewable energy (including agrofuels) will make up only 9 percent of global energy consumption. It is a dangerous self-delusion to argue that agrofuels can play a significant role in combating global warming.
As is spelt out in this special edition of the magazine, the wide-scale cultivation of agrofuels will actually make things worse in many parts of the world, notably Southeast Asia and the Amazon basin, where the drying of peat lands and the felling of tropical forest will release far more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than will be saved by using agrofuels.
One of the main causes of global warming is agroindustrial farming itself and the global food system associated with it. Although it is scarcely ever mentioned, farming is responsible for 14 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. Within farming, the largest single cause is the use of chemical fertilisers, which introduce a huge amount of nitrogen into the soil and nitrous oxide into the air. Changing land use (mainly deforestation and thus linked to the expansion of crop monoculture) is responsible for another 18 percent. And a large part of global transport, which is responsible for a further 14 percent of emissions, stems from the way in which the agro-industrial complex moves large quantities of food from one continent to another.
It is clear that climate change can be halted only by challenging the absurdity and the waste of the globalised food system as organized by the transnational corporations. Far from contributing to the solution, agrofuels will only make a bad situation worse. GRAIN believes it is time to declare unambiguously “No to the agrofuels craze!”

By: Seedling (Grain)

 
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