Food vs fuel?

source : http://www.journeytoforever.org
The anti-biofuels controversy
There's been a growing storm of protest against biofuels in the last few years, rising to a frenzy this year (2008) as the global food crisis hit home.It's been claimed that biofuels are "even worse than fossil fuel", that biofuel production is driving millions of poor people into starvation, that biofuels are a "crime against humanity" -- it's reported that tropical rainforests are being destroyed to make way for biofuels crop plantations, while good farmland is being used to raise biofuels crops instead of food, creating food shortages and driving up food prices, especially for the world's poor.Dozens of countries have seen food riots as prices soared out of reach and angry people took to the streets.Authorities estimate that the crisis has already driven at least 30 million more poor people to hunger, and warn that the numbers of the newly hungry could rise to as much as 290 million or even much higher. And they say much of the blame lies with biofuels production.Are biofuels really to blame?Yes, partly, but there's more to it than that -- it doesn't work quite that way, and neither does hunger.First of all, not all biofuels are the same.GRAIN, an international non-governmental organisation that promotes sustainable agriculture, defined what isn't biofuel in an excellent 60-page report in June 2007 on the damage the biofuels "craze" is causing:"We believe that the prefix bio, which comes from the Greek word for 'life', is entirely inappropriate for such anti-life devastation."So, following the lead of non-governmental organisations and social movements in Latin America, we do not talk about biofuels and green energy."Agrofuels is a much better term, we believe, to express what is really happening: agribusiness producing fuel from plants as another commodity in a wasteful, destructive and unjust global economy."http://www.grain.org/nfg/?id=502Quite right.But GRAIN didn't define what biofuel is, only what it isn't.Real biofuel that causes no anti-life devastation is being produced worldwide by thousands upon thousands of small-scale projects focusing on local production for local use. They use renewable, locally available resources wherever possible, including wastes, and they fit in with the local community and the local environment.Nobody knows quite how many of them there are or how much fuel they produce, but it totals many millions of gallons a year, going up fast, and that many millions of gallons a year of fossil fuels not used.This is the Appropriate Technology approach founded in 1973 by the British economist Dr. E.F. Schumacher in his famous book Small is Beautiful -- Economics as if people mattered, which is still the foundation text on a sustainable future.None of the arguments against agrofuels apply to this type of biofuels production, whether it's of biodiesel, ethanol, biogas or whatever.Real biofuels are indeed clean, green, renewable and sustainable, and it's real biofuels that Journey to Forever promotes and has helped to develop."Small is beautifuel," commented Prof. Pagandai Pannirselvam of Brazil at the Biofuel email discussion group hosted by Journey to Forever.And big is agrofuel, not beautifuel.Like all agribusiness crops, agrofuels are industrialised monocrops that guzzle fossil-fuels, spew out greenhouse gases, wreck the environment and the soil, impoverish local people and are unsustainable in every way.Objections to biofuels-as-agrofuels are really just objections to industrialised agriculture itself, along with "free trade" (free of regulations) and all the other trappings of the global food system that help to make it so destructive.With the demand for agrofuels soaring in the rich countries, agribusiness palm-oil production in the tropical countries is indeed even more evil than it used to be, and it is causing rainforest destruction as the palm-oil plantations spread. But it's really just a difference in scale and degree, it's nothing new -- it was doing that anyway long before the demand for agrofuels arose.It's the same with the other cases where agrofuels production is damaging the environment and ruining local people's livelihoods, it's just agribusiness-as-usual, only worse.The hunger also isn't new. The number of hungry people has been fairly constant at about 850 million for at least 20 years. The current estimate is that 862 million people are starving and nearly 3 billion are undernourished -- nearly half of humanity.A Worldwatch Institute report, "Biofuels for Transport", prepared for the German Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection in 2007, calls for policies to promote small-scale, labour-intensive production of biofuels crops rather than "large plantations of monocultures controlled by wealthy producers, who could drive farmers from their land..." See "Biofuels for Transport: Global potential and implications for sustainable energy and agriculture in the 21st Century", Worldwatch Institute, Earthscan, 2007, 452pp.http://www.earthscan.co.uk/?tabid=1161Extended summary:http://www.worldwatch.org/system/files/EBF038.pdfMore and more people are saying similar things, including some rather prominent ones.Since January 2008, Professor Robert Watson, chief scientist at the UK's Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and Director of the UN's ground-breaking IAASTD World Agriculture Report released in April, as well as the UK government chief scientific adviser Professor John Beddington, plus his predecessor Dr David King, along with a British Royal Society report of a 14-month study on biofuels, and the IAASTD World Agriculture Report itself, have all attacked biofuels production for causing rainforest destruction and displacing food crops and small farmers, and for causing more carbon emissions than they save.But they all pointed out that not all biofuels are the same: there are "good" biofuels and "bad" biofuels.The IAASTD World Agriculture Report, the work of more than 400 scientists over four years and the biggest study of its kind ever conducted, said: "Small-scale biofuels could offer livelihood opportunities, especially in remote regions and countries where high transport costs impede agricultural trade and energy imports."The British Royal Society report said: "Each biofuel must be assessed on its own merits." See Sustainable biofuels: prospects and challenges, The Royal Society 14 Jan 2008, PDF 922kbhttp://royalsociety.org/displaypagedoc.asp?id=28914"It is important to remember that one biofuel is not the same as another," said Professor John Pickett, who co-authored the Royal Society report. He said it "depends on how crops are grown and converted and how the fuel is used".