Agrofuels 201
Faced with dwindling fuel reserves and the intensifying impacts of climate change, society’s hopes for the future of our food and energy systems rest on the notion that we can produce renewable fuels. Yet a global debate has erupted over the best sources of renewable energy. “Biofuel” proponents speak of meeting future energy needs while raising farm incomes and renewing rural economies. Critics, however, warn that what we are getting are “agrofuels,” produced in industrial farming systems that extract wealth out of communities and pollute the environment.
Meanwhile, federal policies have mandated major increases in U.S. agrofuel consumption, causing us to reach outside of our borders to countries such as Brazil to meet our demand. As the United States’ appetite for agrofuels continues to grow and other countries join this trend, the ecological and social footprint of agrofuel consumption will be increasingly felt throughout the world. Recognizing the growing interdependency of our food and energy systems, as Christians we are called on to consider the agrofuels debate from the perspectives of hungry and of communities which are trying to feed themselves.
The Presbyterian Hunger Program contributed to a special report published by a coalition of partner organizations entitled "Fueling Disasters." Case studies, testimonials from farmer and indigenous movements, and reports from international and U.S. agencies are used to demonstrate that the trend towards massive expansion of agrofuel production is the latest in a progression towards industrial agriculture and corporate consolidation of the world’s land, food and water resources. This trend poses a particular threat to the community food security and food sovereignty movement, which promotes the right of all people in all communities “to obtain safe, culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet(s) through a sustainable food system that maximizes community self reliance and social justice.”
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Food Security and the Right to Food
The right to food is already denied to the 20 percent of the world’s population who are hungry. Expansion of agrofuel production (including the industrial-scale production of “second generation” agrofuels) will directly compete with community resources for food production (e.g., land, water and nutrients); increase dependency on food imports; and perpetuate an unregulated market for agricultural commodities that neither guarantees food for all nor fair prices for farmers.
Agricultural Workers’ Rights
Human rights violations are prevalent in industrial agricultural fields today. The growth of agrofuel production, which relies on large-scale plantations, will only perpetuate a system that already disregards workers’ rights. Increased demand for agrofuel crops such as sugarcane and soy will likely lead to increased human rights violations including slave wages, enslavement and child labor, as well as increased incidences of sicknesses and deaths resulting from dangerous plantation work.
Community Economic Development
Agrofuels are often presented as a way of rescuing an industrial agriculture-based economy that is deeply broken. The reality is that the commodity markets themselves are broken. Without addressing corporate concentration, parity for family farmers, and the need for local food systems to feed communities, simply selling more commodities for agrofuels will not reverse existing failures, nor will it bring lasting prosperity to rural communities in the United States or abroad.
Environment
Agrofuels are promoted as a “green” technology, yet current production practices contribute to water depletion, soil erosion, contamination by genetically modified organisms and other environmental problems. The refining process is also quite polluting, and the common placement of refineries in low-income communities has raised serious environmental justice concerns. Furthermore, the net energy balance of agrofuels remains subject to major debate, and as carbon-capturing forests are felled to make way for fuel crops, the result will be increased, rather than decreased, greenhouse gas emissions.
View the short video Agrofuels and the Environment in Spanish and English. The clip is of Alberto Gomez of Via Campesina (Mexico), speaking at a public forum organized by the Unitarian Service Committee (USC) and its Canadian partners. The message from the forum was clear: our global agriculture is already stretched to the limit and not producing enough food. Agrofuels production is simply making hunger worse.
Conclusions and Recommendations from Coalition of Partner Organizations
The principles of community food security imply that fuel is not a priority over food, and governments’ actions to make it so undermine the world’s hungry and struggling rural communities. Unless the agrofuels market builds new wealth that stays in rural economies, strengthens the social fabric of communities, and builds greater resilience for an uncertain future, communities will gain very little from agrofuel production. While this report focuses on industrial-scale agrofuels, there are examples of integrating sustainable energy and agriculture that benefit community food security, such as small farmer settlements in Brazil intercropping energy and food crops and community farms in the United States using locally-made agrodiesel for farm machinery. Family farmers, indigenous peoples and environmentalists are using these examples to further explore the connections between sustainable energy, food security and rural development and to promote food and energy sovereignty — the democratization of both food and energy systems. Below are key actions that focus on food security and developing real sustainable energy solutions.
Adapted from "Fueling Disasters: a Community Food Security Perspective on Agrofuels," Community Food Security Coalition International Links Committee, December 2007.
Editorial Commentary:
Additional Considerations on Cellulosic Ethanol
The issue for first generation ethanol made from corn, for example, is how arable land is used. Ultimately, the same is true for second generation ethanol made from grasses or other biomass. Is land used for fuel or for food? When switchgrass and trees become fuel-crop commodities, they will inevitably be intensively and industrially mono-cropped using fertilizers, quite probably genetic engineering (or GMO), and irrigation for maximum production and profit. This will erase any environmental service they could have provided. Bottom line: if agrofuels produce more profit than food crops, they will be planted on cropland. Then we are back to the original problems with first generation ethanol, such as is made from corn.
The problem with second generation cellulosic ethanol, and agrofuels in general, is the lack of regulation. We must generate enough political will and government capacity to regulate the powerful oil, genetic engineering, grain and automotive industries. This has been historically weak in the United States and is nearly impossible in the global south.
Even Brazil — the country with the most regulatory capacity in Latin America — is unable to control the expansion of industrial farming into the Cerrado or Amazon regions, prevent the displacement of smallholders or keep the sugarcane industry from utilizing coerced labor. Their environmental ministry is virtually powerless to control construction, petroleum or agribusiness pollution.
In the United States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the EPA are blunt instruments for environmental or social protection, and our anti-trust laws have done nothing to keep Cargill, ADM or Monsanto from building politically-influential agribusiness monopolies. The fines slapped on ADM — the largest in anti-trust history — are still chicken feed for the industry, and simply taken in stride as the cost of doing business. There must be renewed will and new ways of making our anti-trust laws work, especially when it comes to regulating these industries environmentally.
We need to focus our attention on how agrofuels are transforming our food and fuel systems, and create strategies that move us in a sustainable direction. At the same time, we must understand and resist the ways that the grain, oil and genetic engineering industries use agrofuels to re-position themselves to gain influence and profits. |
