Biofuels land grab a 'recipe for mass hunger'

A few months ago, representatives of nine villages in Madagascar held a press conference in the city of Antananarivo to denounce the Italian company Tozzi Renewable Energy for taking away their lands as part of a 100,000 hectare jatropha plantation that the company is building.

"We small peasants are forced to leave because men armed with guns have come to throw us off our lands," they told reporters. In Sierra Leona, Zainab Kamara is one of several thousand farmers in whose lands have been taken over by the Swiss company Addax Bioenergy for a 10,000 hectare sugar cane plantation to produce ethanol.

"Now I don’t have a farm. Starvation is killing people. We have to buy rice to survive because we don't grow our own now," she says. This one sugar cane project will use 26% percent of Sierra Leone’s largest river flow during the driest months, February to April. In neighbouring Guinea, the government has sold 700,000 hectares to another European firm to grow jatropha. It’s a story repeated in South America, especially in Brazil.

These are just some examples of the havoc wreaked by an unprecedented land grab with the purpose of producing biofuels from raw materials. Europe is one of the centres of this monstrous trade, with purpose-built facilities in the port of Rotterdam part of a frenzy that resembles the ruthless colonialism of the 19th century.

Neste Oil, the state-owned Finnish oil company, has a renewable diesel plant in Rotterdam that will churn out over 900 million litres a year, using palm oil for at least 50% of its raw materials. The firm owns the world’s largest plant in Singapore, which also converts palm oil to diesel for export to Europe.

Next door to Neste Oil's Rotterdam operation is a massive ethanol plant owned by the Spanish energy company Abengoa. Swiss-based Glencore, Europe's second largest agricultural commodities trading house, owns two biodiesel plants in Rotterdam, with a combined capacity of 740 million litres per year

According to a new report from GRAIN, Europe's biofuel companies are increasingly looking for full control over production, right down to the crops. “Shell and BP, for instance, have spent hundreds of millions of euros buying up sugar cane plantations and mills in Brazil to produce ethanol. French commodities giant Louis Dreyfus is also buying up farmland and sugar plantations in South America to feed its ethanol and biodiesel plants.”

European companies are responsible for a third of all the biofuel land grabs that have been reported since 2002, with over 290 seizures totalling 19 million hectares. The forecast is that the global demand for biofuels will more than double by 2020. The additional land required is equivalent to about 80% of the total land mass of Spain.

GRAIN acknowledges that campaigns, negotiations and criticism of the European Union-driven biofuels mania have had little effect. Recent changes to its policy of encouraging biofuels are minimal. “The EU has made only symbolic gestures to add a green veneer to the brutal global land grab that has resulted,” the sustainable farming campaign says

Of the three major markets for biofuels – the US and Brazil are the others - the EU is the only one that relies heavily on imports, both for feedstock (the crops used for biofuel production) and for food to replace European crops diverted to biofuel production. Biofuels eat up over a third of coarse grain production in the US, the world’s largest exporter.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) calls biofuels “the largest source of new demand for agricultural production in the past decade” and says that they represent a new “market fundamental” affecting prices for all cereals”. In plain language, the market says that biofuels is more profitable than food, while the prices of basic necessities soar.

Add in the growing impact of climate change and the separate land grab by sovereign wealth funds to produce food in poor countries for export, you have what GRAIN calls a “a recipe for mass hunger”. As the campaign points out: “These communities and the food systems they sustain are not renewable.”

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Global food crisis grows

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is warning that it will be forced to abandon millions of people to starvation, as sharp increases in food prices eat into its funds. International market prices for wheat, corn, soya beans and dozens of other commodities have doubled or trebled in recent years.

The main focus of the WFP to date has been to provide aid in areas where food was unavailable. But the programme now faces having to help countries where the price of food, rather than shortages, is the problem. Josette Sheeran, WFP executive director, said the agency - the world’s largest humanitarian programme - would look at “cutting the food rations or even the number or people reached” if donors did not provide more money.

The price jump in agricultural commodities – such as wheat, corn, rice and soya beans – is having a wider impact than thought, hitting countries that have previously largely escaped hunger. The WFP says that in response to rising food costs, families in developing countries were moving in some cases from three meals a day to just one, or dropping a diverse diet to rely on one staple food.

Egypt has widened its food rationing system for the first time in two decades while Pakistan has reintroduced a ration card system that was abandoned in the mid-1980s. Countries such as China and Russia are imposing price controls while others, such as Argentina and Vietnam, are enforcing foreign sales taxes or export bans.

The WFP’s warning came just hours after Richard Branson launched another bio-fuelled stunt to publicise his continuing campaign for a greener, cleaner, and altogether kinder capitalism. And the connection between these two events?

There are many factors contributing to rising food prices – strong demand from rapidly developing countries like China and India; the sharply increased price of oil for agriculture, shipping and fertiliser production, a rising global population; more frequent floods and droughts caused by climate change. But the biggest impact comes from the shift to biofuels.

In the space of a few years, the US has diverted about 40m tonnes of maize to produce bioethanol – about 4% of global production of coarse grains. That rapid growth is largely the result of government subsidies as the fading global power struggles to reduce its dependence on carbon-based oil imported from the Middle East.

A report from the Nature Conservancy and the University of Minnesota has raised serious questions over how biofuels are grown. Converting rainforests, peatlands, savannahs or grasslands to grow fuel crops releases CO2, in some cases a staggering 420 times more CO2 than from burning fossil fuel, the report says. Using fertiliser on biofuel crops will emit enough nitrous oxide (more than 296 times more powerful heat trapping gas than CO2) to wipe out all the carbon savings biofuels produce, say other sources. Biofuel crops could also put an unbearable strain on the global water supply, say Swedish researchers.

Far from providing a green alternative to fossil fuels, there is a danger that the struggle to sustain capitalist production through biofuels will trigger a vicious cycle of a food versus fuel competition over which will yield the most profit. This will lead to further food shortages, drive up food prices, and encourage even more farmers to choose to grow fuel over food crops to meet the increasing demand - and clear more land in the process. The choice is becoming simpler: either starvation on a global scale or the transformation of economic and political systems, transferring the power over life and death away from greedy corporations and into the hands of the majority who have real needs.

Gerry Gold
AWTW economics editor

Biofuels increase emissions - and profits

Straight from a most unlikely source comes news of another eco-scandal. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has exposed the fact that the European Commission is colluding with renewable energy corporations and investors. The aim is to ensure that environmental standards are not allowed to interfere with profitability and investment opportunities in biofuel production. The OECD says that Europe has adopted ambitious targets for switching to biofuels “without an in-depth understanding of a sustainable production level and from where this biofuel could be supplied”. It warns that there is “a serious risk that biofuel quotas are higher than potential sustainable supply, creating a strong incentive to ‘cheat’ in the system”.

And this cheating is already well under way. Biofuel corporations are actively opposing the introduction of mandatory sustainability standards by the EC, as a new report published by the Transnational Institute explains. Most “renewable energy” businesses responding to an EC consultation rejected the idea of safeguards that would ensure that biofuels sold in Europe would have lower greenhouse gas emissions than the petrol or diesel they replace. They proposed voluntary regulation, and stressed that nothing should be done to interfere with market growth.

British Sugar, for example, stated that: “We fully support minimum environmental standards for biofuels in the European Union, but do not think a certificate system is the best method. In introducing these standards, there is always the danger of slowing development in the market.” The Renewable Energy Association (UK), whose members include BP Alternative Fuels, British Sugar and Shell International, said that minimum environmental standards would be “an ill-considered approach, which... will risk undermining future investment in the European biofuels market and could blight existing investment”.

British Sugar, BP, Du Pont and Associated British Foods are partners in two joint ventures to establish multi-million pound biofuel production plants in Norfolk and Hull. The European Investment Bank is finalising its approval for the provision of £120m of project financing for both ventures, at attractive interest rates - the first direct financing provided by the EIB for a biofuel project.

Targets are now being set, and subsidies and loans are being granted, without addressing fundamental sustainability issues. When asked whether the 10% target for switching to bio-fuels would be dropped or adjusted if negative impacts were demonstrated, the European Commission responded that this would not happen, as it would create too much uncertainty for investors. They propose that in future they will look at just two issues to measure sustainability: greenhouse gas balance and impact on high biodiversity values. Excluded from consideration are social impacts such as food security, land conflicts and water and soil degradation. The EC is hiding behind World Trade Organisation market competition rules to avoid including such social criteria.

To meet EU and US biofuel targets means clearing virgin forest and grassland, bush and jungle, in the world’s poorest areas, releasing carbon stored in earth and vegetation that will outweigh any reduction in emissions achieved. The planned large-scale monoculture of palm oil, soya and other crops needs massive inputs of fertilisers, releasing NO₂ - a greenhouse gas more potent than CO₂. The reality is that the global rush to biofuels will actually increase emissions of greenhouse gases. But as long as it also increases emissions of profit, that’s fine by the European Commission and the new biofuel corporations.

Penny Cole
AWTW environment editor

Agrofuel market madness

Hundreds of thousands of acres of land, whether in the UK or elsewhere on the planet, will be needed to feed a giant bio-ethanol plant to be opened near Hull by a joint company set up by BP and Associated British Foods. The company claims fuel production is separate from food production and "the impact on food prices is likely to be negligible". But production of bio-ethanol and biodiesel, from vegetable oils such as soya or palm, is already having an impact on the cost of food and on the environment. There have been demonstrations in Mexico, where the maize crop is being sold off for ethanol, pushing up the price of flour. And in China the cost of pork, the main protein source for ordinary people, is rising because feed is being used for bio-fuel. In Indonesia, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cambodia, Malaysia, Uganda and many other places, crucial CO2 absorbing rain forest is being cut down to make room for palm oil plantations. One fifth of the US corn crop is now used to make ethanol and a study by Goldman Sachs has found that the price of a unit of energy from biofuels has risen to that of petrol.

Roger Higman, campaign co-ordinator for Friends of the Earth, said he would like to see mandatory requirements on companies involved in biofuels to ensure that their crop production was sustainable, whether in the developing world or in the UK: "We are neutral (!) on this kind of proposal [from BP and ABF] because we support green fuels, but you have to be careful because you could destroy the British countryside and the habitat for wildlife with the intensive growing of wheat." Being “neutral” on this proposal just about sums up the problem facing the mainstream green movement. They have hitched their wagon to the capitalist star, believing – in the face of all the evidence to the contrary – that sooner or later governments will regulate the corporations, and the corporations will deliver a profitable approach to tackling climate change. But starting with Kyoto and right up until the recent G8 summit, what governments have done is wash their hands of the problem and hand it over to the market. And the market is, of course, the place where global corporations like BP go to make profit, not to make the world a better, or more sustainable, place.

Meanwhile, people in south Yorkshire are digging their belongings out of the mud and of course, the poorest of them have no insurance. And this is nothing compared to the impact of recent floods in India and Pakistan. And in Greece, Italy and Romania, heatwaves are killing people and animals and destroying harvests. We are running out of time, and on tomorrow’s climate change demonstration members of A World to Win will be arguing that we must get far beyond asking the government to improve its Climate Change Bill – particularly since ministers have already made clear to the Commons environmental audit committee that they have no intention of changing it at all. Grain, the sustainable farming group, in a report out today, has denounced what it calls agrofuels for causing “anti-life devastation”, adding: “It is abundantly clear that we can only halt climate change by challenging the absurdity and the waste of the globalised food system as organised by the transnational corporations.” That is why AWTW advocates the development of a mass movement to transform the political state, the system of land ownership, and the economic drivers for production. Only a not-for-profit democracy can tackle climate change and develop into a holistic system for stewardship of the planet and its eco-system.


Penny Cole, environment editor