The 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

George Monbiot
Tuesday November 6, 2007
The Guardian
Guardian Unlimited home | Guardian Unlimited


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.

Monbiot.com

You know something, Lion, every time Africans try to do something that will seriously improve their economic fudamentals, there is always a big uproar about how they are making mistakes that will somehow harm somebody, someplace or something. Remember how they claimed that Abdel Nasser's Aswan Dam Project would harm African artifacts? How about Al-Bashir's project in Sudan being racist? Every time.

Now this non-sense about biofuel marketing causing starvation. Get real! By entering the biofuel market, Africa will position itself to compete with the big energy companies as fossil fuels dry up. Plus, they will earn foreign exchange that can be used to finance all kinds of development.

The foreign exchange brought in could help to finance land reclamation all over Africa. This in turn would stimulate food production.

Know anti-African Propaganda when you see it.

BLACKLION I CO -SIGN THE ABOVE ARTICLE YOU'VE PROVIDED ABSOLUTE TRUTH THERE:


Esme Choonara looks at protests and riots as market madness threatens world’s poor

Millions around the world are facing a future of insecurity, starvation and malnutrition as the price of basic food soars. The price of maize, wheat, soya beans and rice – staples for the majority of the world’s population – have more than doubled in the last few years.

Around 25,000 people currently die every day from hunger and poverty-related causes. This figure is set to rise as food prices drive more into food insecurity.

Earlier this month the International Fund for Agricultural Development predicted that “the number of food-insecure people in the world would rise by more than 16 million for every percentage point increase in the real prices of staple foods, meaning that 1.2 billion people could be chronically hungry by 2025”.

The United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) also warned last week that it would be forced to ration food aid as rocketing costs create crises.

This growing hunger has provoked resistance around the world. Last week there were food riots in Burkino Faso, Morocco and Egypt. These follow protests in Senegal and Mauritania earlier this year.

Rising food prices are felt most acutely in the Global South, but they also impact on the less well off in Britain, where rises in the price of bread, eggs, milk and other food basics are hitting the poorest hardest.

Some mainstream commentators have blamed price rises on recent poor harvests, but in reality it is the chaos wreaked by capitalism that is driving up food prices.

Basic foods, like other commodities, suffer from the fluctuations and panics in the global market. Rising prices create their own panic buying, which can cause prices to spiral – this is what drove quality wheat prices to jump 25 percent in just one day this week.

There are also longer term reasons for rising food prices, including the shift to biofuel production.

Over the past five years there has been a massive shift in crop production from food to biofuels. In the US, for example, over 40 million tonnes of maize production has been diverted from food to distilling bioethanol for fuel.

Biofuels have been heralded as a new “green” replacement for fossil fuels, but evidence is mounting that its production and use causes immense damage to the environment.

The new fuels are an extremely lucrative business, however, and the rush to invest in expanding the industry has both pushed up grain prices and diverted vast tracts of agricultural land.

The impact of price rises is compounded by growing dominance of agribusinesses that can ride out food price fluctuations by hoarding food and controlling food markets.

The most obscene fact about starvation is that it is not caused by lack of food. As the Financial Times argued this week, “The world has enough food to feed everyone – if there is the will to do so.”

The problem is that decisions about what is produced and how it is distributed are in the hands of capitalist corporations and governments. Capitalism’s pursuit of profit is bringing misery to millions – and unless it is stopped, the system will go on to starve many millions more.

Food statistics

400% – Rise in the price of spring wheat over the last year

75% – Average world food price rise since 2005

16 million more people at risk of food insecurity for every percentage point rise in the price of staple foods

33% – Amount of maize harvested in US this year that will go to produce biofuels



© Copyright Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original and leave this notice in place.

Republished from:
Food price rises will kill millions|1Mar08|Socialist Worker

What you are failing to take into account is the need for independent African Economic Development. As Economic Development progresses, Africa will be become more and more capable of feeding its people. This will include an expanding agricultrual potential as more and more land is reclaimed from the marginal lands and the wastelands. This is not rocket science.

.. of course the other thread I posted was about used cooking oil which can be obtained for free from chip shops etc (until they catch on) and converting it to usable bio fuel not having it, 'made to order' from a developing country which was later discussed in that thread.

Yes, Lion. But cooking oil is bio-degradable. It is derived from organic materials such as vegetable oil and animal fat. All of these come the exact same source that bio fuels come from: increased agricultural production. What is happening now as the price of fossil fuels increase, more demand is made on bio-fuels. Thus, the prices for food increase due to a developing scarity of food caused by energy demands being placed on agricultural production. The only solution to this problem is increased agricultural production. Asia and Europe and most of America have reached their maximum food production capacity based on curent food production technology. This leaves Africa.

The Creator Supreme, Most Merciful, Most Gracious had it all figured out from the beginning. HE gave Africa to us Africans. And, it so happens that Africa is the richest piece of real estate in the world. Not only do the fossil fuels come from Africa (ana Arabia); Africa has the greatest potential for producing organic materials from which bio-fuels and increased food production can and must be derived. We as Africans must be aware of this fact. Once aware, we will prepare for the inevitable by developing, or rather continuing to develop, the technology needed to reclaim the marginal lands and waste lands of Africa. This includes desalination of sea water. When we do this, we will arrest the growing scarcity of the world's food supply. At the same time, we will earn the foreign exchange that will finance all of our industrial and social needs.