Agrofuels: Opportunity or Danger? - Institute for Agriculture and ...

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Amazon rainforest can be observed, leading to rising prices for land in Brazil and consequently to a drastic slow down of the land reform project and rural development. According to McMichael the promotion of agrofuels follows the Green Revolution’s misleading attempt to “feed the world” via chemicals and biotechnology with a further subordination of agriculture - this time to fuel energy-intensive consumption patterns in the developed North. Agrofuels production as promoted today exacerbates a series of negative trends already existing with the agro-industrial model such carbon emissions, land concentration, biodiversity loss and monoculture crops. The current approach to agrofuels reinforces the energy crisis rather than solving it, according to McMichael. The International Energy Agency estimates that by 2030, 147 million tons of agrofuels will be produced. This quantity will “barely offset the yearly increase in global oil demand” now at 136 tons a year. It is expected that all renewable energies including agrofuels will amount to only 9 percent of global energy consumption. Furthermore the industrial food system itself requires increased energy to produce food. New players emerge and transform the agroindustrial model: Today new actors emerge on the scene, including new powerful alliances seeking investment opportunities. Besides agri- and food corporations, also oil, car, biotech industrial alliances seek investment opportunities in the Global South. Various privatepublic alliances are emerging such as the palm-oil complex which includes Cargill, ADM-Kuck-Wilmar alliance, and Synergy Drive. According to Greenpeace, this alliance is soon to become the world’s biggest palm oil conglomerate. The “ethanol alliance” includes the U.S., Brazil, the Central American corridor along with different transnational corporations (TNCs). Brazil has established other ethanol alliances with India, China and South Africa. The Southern Cone transgenic soy complex includes Argentina, Paraguay with Bunge and Dreyfus to serve EU preferences. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), is chaired by Unilever and includes corporations along the supply chain, from ADM through Cargill to Cadbury’s, Nestlé, Procter and Gamble, and Tesco. The challenges today are to expose the manifest short-sightedness of the proposed role of agrofuels, including the model of production promoted in its current form to shed light on the endemic crisis of industrial agriculture; and to demonstrate the futility of expecting parts of the problem to become a solution to a planet-threatening crisis of global warming. Both show how agrofuels are part of the same agro-industrial model exacerbating the situation, and advocate for a new paradigm that re-centers agriculture within a food and energy sovereignty framework. This is essential to arresting climate change and ensuring a sustainable future. Civil Society perspectives on agrofuels and the role agrofuels can play in a new energy approach In this panel discussion, representatives from different organizations – farmer groups, consumer groups, environmental and developmental groups from the U.S., the EU and 16
Brazil reflected on whether agrofuels can play a positive role in a new energy approach. The broad variety of the different panelists exposed the different views and interests at stake. Farmer perspectives Shelby Matthews from COPA/COGECA, representing a broad range of farmers in the EU (from small to large farms, including cooperatives), outlined the hopes for farmers in the European Union with regards to agrofuels. After years of low commodity prices and hence the lowering of their incomes, agrofuels is considered as a new source of income for farmers. In the EU, farmers within COPA/COGECA also consider agrofuels as an opportunity to promote sustainable agriculture and to be less dependent on retailing corporations which are increasingly concentrated and hence have huge price setting power. Setting sustainability standards for the production of agrofuels and for agricultural production overall is key to find a positive way forward, including the applicability of such standards for imports. Keith Bolin from the American Corn Growers Association noted that the increased demand for agroenergy and commodity price hikes are forcing industrial animal factories to pay the real cost of production for the feedstock. With agricultural trade liberalization, agribusinesses could lower the commodity prices well below the cost of production at the detriment of farmer’s incomes. Agrofuels and agroenergy presents for them a possibility for higher incomes and new income sources for farmers. Moving towards locally produced food and agroenergy for local consumption could help to lower the negative balance of trade, slow down the demand and use of fossil fuels and make U.S. farmers less dependent on supplying export markets. Access to a domestic market that pays remunerative incomes is seen as a strategy to pursue. Cost covering and remunerative commodity prices would save taxpayers money. The challenge in the U.S. is to support high commodity prices on the one hand, to reduce energy consumption on the other, and to avoid exploiting developing countries within this context. Patrick Sadones from the Confederation Paysanne in France and Pedro Christoffoli from the Landless Movement in Brazil – both members of Via Campesina – presented a more critical farmers’ view on agrofuels. Both speakers agreed that certain types of agroenergy could be part of a new energy supply, but outlined clearly that without a radical reduction in energy consumption and a radical shift to support more sustainable farming methods, more damage will be done by agrofuels. Without changing the industrial model of agriculture and without halting and reversing the free trade model and trade expansion expressed at the WTO, but also in bilateral and bi-regional agreements, agrofuels as promoted today can only lead to a social and environmental disaster. They are engaged in struggles of resistance at all levels to raise awareness about the need for a sustainable model of agriculture, food and energy production. Many of such struggles exist already today. The challenge is to link these struggles and to build alternatives for agriculture. 17
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