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

Only so much oil in the ground

Native Americans from the Cree clan will today announce a legal challenge to the Alberta government’s issuing of permits allowing oil corporations to start extracting oil from tar sands in the Beaver Lake area. This highly profitable activity will pollute hunting and fishing lands and destroy protected areas and species. The Co-operative Bank has offered the Cree £50,000 towards their legal costs.

The rush for cheap oil is speeding up everywhere, though the oil price has plummeted. The International Energy Agency explains why: even assuming no growth in demand, an extra 45 million barrels per day of oil production will be needed by 2030 in order to compensate for falling output in ageing oilfields.

But the low price means there is no incentive to explore for underground or undersea deposits. Tar sand doesn’t need to be searched for – you just drag out the oil, devastate the land, and pocket the profits.

The anarchy and injustice of the market is nowhere more clear than in energy. Investment in alternative energy is now at a standstill as the corporations abandon any efforts to reduce carbon emissions. The price of carbon credits has fallen so low, that it is cheaper to go on polluting than to invest in cleaner technologies.

Governments are reducing subsidies for alternative energy and the credit crunch means there loans to alternative energy companies are few and far between. The big energy giants are pulling out of alternatives with the exception of bio-fuels from grain, which are heavily subsidised in the US.

BP is cutting solar cell production in Australia, abandoning all its wind power projects except in the US and scrapping plans for “experimental” carbon capture power stations. It is doing it because its net profit for the last quarter was only $2.605 billion compared to a forecast $2.98 billion. BP is one of the companies involved in the Alberta Basin project.

The oil corporation is also cutting investment in an experimental project to produce oil from jatropha, a hardy plant that can be grown on land unsuitable for food crops. This is just the kind of production that could offer a living to farmers in poor countries in the future – although the model used of growing the plant in India and Africa and then importing it to Mansfield, seems completely crazy.

BP’s partner in the business, D1, has already shut plants in Merseyside and Middlesbrough. They produced bio-diesel from rape seed oil but could not compete with subsidised US bio-diesel. So fuel is being used, and emissions created, to transport supposedly green diesel across the Atlantic ocean.

Now the Mansfield plant faces contraction, and the farmers in India and Africa commissioned to grow 500,000 acres of jatropha will be hit too. And yet, world governments continue to look to this market to deliver consistency of supply AND reduce carbon emissions at the same time. It is the double bind of profit-driven globalisation, which they can see no escape from.

This flawed system is incapable of delivering a just, affordable and sustainable energy supply. We must urgently develop the alternative. Join A World to Win in planning how that can be achieved – start by reading our Action Plan for the Eco-Crisis. And I find it concentrates the mind wonderfully if you have playing in the background the amazing Tower of Power’s prescient 1973 hit "Only so Much Oil in the Ground".

Penny Cole
Environment editor