(Bio)Fueling Injustice? - Europafrica

people’s land tenure and access to land; damaging biodiversity and the environment;
and pushing rural people deeper into poverty; thus generating human rights
violations. Affected people most often have no effective means of redress, injustice
being commonplace in the realm of land grabbing.
Some response from the international community, but
prospects are still gloomy
Faced with these challenges, farmers’ groups and civil society have started to organise
and react. Farmers’ organisations, religious organisations, non-governmental
organisations, unions and other social movements gathered in 2011 in Dakar for the
World Social Forum and adopted the Dakar Appeal against the land grab, which has
been signed by more than 900 organisations worldwide.
Relevant policy discussions regarding investments in land are currently
underway. Some of these seek to move beyond the formerly prevalent and facile “winwin”
discourse. A Set of Minimum Principles for Land Investments was presented by
the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food in 2010. The FAO Voluntary
Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests
in the Context of National Food Security are currently being negotiated in the context
of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS). Following the adoption of these
Guidelines, the CFS will start a process of broad consultation to develop principles
guiding investment in agriculture from the perspective of enhancing food security and
the right to food.
However, the trend of large investments in land does not seem to have been curbed,
and experts anticipate that the rapid expansion of cultivated area is unlikely to
slow down. The triple crisis (food crisis, financial crisis and oil peak) that created the
conditions for the rush for land in 2008-2009 is still with us. Food and energy needs,
together with flawed distribution and overconsumption patterns, make land an ever
more valuable asset. Amongst these factors, biofuel production has been identified
as an important driver of land grabbing. This directly concerns the EU, which has
recently developed an ambitious biofuel strategy.
A comprehensive EU biofuel policy
Biofuels are fuels made from agricultural commodities such as maize, oilseed or palm
oil. Large-scale industrial products are usually called agrofuels, whereas fuels
produced from biomass on a small scale are called biofuels. Both terms are used in
this report. Blended with normal fossil fuel, biofuels can provide energy for transport.
Their main advantage is thought to be their environmental impact due to reduction of
greenhouse gas emissions, which is a factor of global warming.
The Renewable Energy Directive (RED) adopted by the EU in 2009 sets an objective
that in practice demands 10% biofuels in road transport by 2020. This biofuel policy is
supported by various other EU instruments, including in the areas of trade,
development cooperation and diplomacy.
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