The rush to put biofuels in our gas tanks has given people analyzing natural resources and conflict some work to do. How are European and American policy mandates to dramatically increase the use of biofuels affecting the places that grow biofuel inputs? It seems fair to say that little consideration has been given to the potential conflict and equity impacts of this surge in demand for palm oil, sugarcane, and corn.
After President Bush's 2007 State of the Union address, which called for massive increases in biofuels, we heard stories of skyrocketing corn tortilla prices and resulting social disruptions.
Now we have stories coming from places like West Kalimantan, a remote region of Indonesia where the rush to plant palm-oil plantations is generating conflict with Indonesians who grow rubber trees and other crops on their small plots of land. The NGO Friends of the Earth Netherlands has a new report calling out the unethical practices of some palm-oil companies that clear existing crops first and make payouts (maybe) to the farmers who own the land later.
It strikes me that this particular link between natural resource management and conflict offers an avenue for addressing one of the traditional shortcomings of environment and conflict research.
Rightly or wrongly (and it has been a little of both), much environment and conflict research has been criticized for neglecting the impact of transnational economic forces on so-called "local" conflicts. For instance, West Africa's mid-1990s "anarchy" is sometimes portrayed simplistically, without sufficient attention to the role Western timber companies or diamond buyers played in creating demand for the forests and precious stones that helped fuel the conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and other countries.
I do not subscribe to the school that says all environment and conflict work falls into this category. And there are big differences between how these issues were presented in the mid-1990s and how they are portrayed today. Our research has gotten better -- both that of original contributors and that of new players. Nevertheless, much environment and conflict work can be characterized as focusing on conflict "over there," without drawing the connections to how North American or European (or increasingly Chinese and Japanese) consumer behavior can play a role in those conflicts.
The links between global consumer behavior and "local" conflict are made unavoidably clear, however, when we see Indonesian palm oil plantations sprouting up in response to the EU mandate for biofuels to constitute 10% of its transport fuels by 2020. All of us in the environmental security world would do well to pay greater attention to these connections. The fact that energy and transportation are part of the biofuels story makes incorporating this issue into European and North American policy and research agendas that much easier. Let's hope the new focus on biofuels shines a spotlight (and not an eclipse) on the social conflict that our energy consumption engenders, often in places that are remote from where the biofuels are used.
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justlou Posted 10:04 am
07 Aug 2007
Read about the African Power Crisis in:
http://www.aspo-usa.com/index.php?option=com_content& ...
We will be putting a real double whammy on poor nations as we drive up the cost of diminishing supplies of oil while developing biofuels. We are likely to find that this will counter efforts we make to decrease poverty and hunger and improve health and living standards. And while our leaders preach the great things that come from democracy, our energy policies may likely inflame social unrest that will destabilize fledgling democracies.
So, tell me again, how all this makes us more secure? We will never be secure until we make planetary health and sustainability of life on earth our central organizing purpose. To every mission, to every proposal, to every philosophy, to every policy, we need apply only one test -- To What End?
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justlou Posted 10:49 am
07 Aug 2007
"What About the Poor?"
by Dave Cohen
http://www.aspo-usa.com/index.php?option=com_content& ...
an excerpt:
"A cynic might say that the poor have always suffered at the hands of the rich, and there's no reason to believe that will stop now. The predicament in the developing world brought about by the oil price shocks ultimately results from overwhelming, wasteful demand for oil in places like the United States, and increasingly, China. Peak oil is an issue for most developing countries only insofar as they are suffering even more now than they already were. This is one of the many reasons why there's no ASPO-Uganda. It's becoming long past peak for the poor, so let's hope they can reorganize their local economies to replace something most of them never had much of to begin with--oil & gas products."
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Ron Steenblik Posted 4:17 pm
07 Aug 2007
We will never be secure until we make planetary health and sustainability of life on earth our central organizing purpose. To every mission, to every proposal, to every philosophy, to every policy, we need apply only one test -- To What End?
Indeed.
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justlou Posted 8:36 pm
07 Aug 2007
I borrowed a little from Al Gore who said something along the same lines several years ago about making the environment our central organizing principle. It obviously did not catch then. Too bad the Republicans and the media had to make Al out to be such a fabricator. The vision was just too inconvenient for them so they demonized him.
Probably no other principle or core belief has the potential for uniting all nations on earth as much as saving the planet for future generations as well as honoring the countless generations of ancestors who survived to bring us life.
Within the US, we are lost without a real end in sight. We extol all the great things about democracy, freedom and pursuit of happiness but to what end? Largely what each individual can get out of the collective machine with little regard for tomorrow or anyone else. How? Protect this "freedom" by protecting the machine at all costs. Secure whatever energy is needed to maintain the machine. Feed the machine with more growth. Manipulate thought to make us think we still have choices or that we are somehow directing the machine to satisfy our desires. Place a green facade over the entire works to make us think we can survive in a world entirely of our own making.
End of sermon -- black helicopter overhead.
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Jonas Posted 1:55 am
08 Aug 2007
The BBC article you refer to was preceded by an article on Mangat Nuan, a poor local Indonesian farmer who leased his land to a palm oil company, which allowed him, for the first time:
-to feed his children
-to send them to school
-to acquire an income
Here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6320285.stm
This is the case for millions of people in the South. But some environmentalists never mention this. They don't like the fact that people can feed their children.
Last week, a panel of African scientists said that biofuels are key to meet the UN's Millennium Goals, aimed at alleviating poverty on a massive scale. Not a single environmentalist wrote about this major finding.
They even keep pushing outright lies about Brazil's sugarcane ethanol, for example. They say cane destroys the Amazon, which is simply not true. But they keep and keep misinforming the public.
And they never make a distinction between, e.g., inefficient corn ethanol and ultra-efficient sugar cane ethanol or the many tens of types of biofuels that are extremely efficient, benefit the environment, restore land and alleviate poverty on a vast scale.
I'm really done with environmentalists who only focus pathologically on the negatives. It may be their role, but they really need more nuance, else they are making themselves irrelevant in any debate.
Ultimately, they are even responsible for keeping millions of farmers in poverty.
*We need socialists to lead this debate, not reactionary neocon environmentalists.*
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Jonas Posted 2:16 am
08 Aug 2007
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Ron Steenblik Posted 2:52 am
08 Aug 2007
They [i.e., reactionary neocon environmentalists] even keep pushing outright lies about Brazil's sugarcane ethanol, for example. They say cane destroys the Amazon, which is simply not true. But they keep and keep misinforming the public.
And they never make a distinction between, e.g., inefficient corn ethanol and ultra-efficient sugar cane ethanol or the many tens of types of biofuels that are extremely efficient, benefit the environment, restore land and alleviate poverty on a vast scale.
Yes, some people with a superficial knowledge of biofuels equate cane ethanol with destruction of the Amazon, but I think as they have become more conversed on the subject, they stop making that accusation. And most biofuel critics or skeptics certainly make a distinction between inefficient corn ethanol and much more efficient sugar cane ethanol.
What critics ARE pointing to, however, is that the expansion of cane production will take place into Brazil's biologically diverse cerrado (which is Brazil's right, but naturally worries a lot of conservationists); that production of corn for ethanol is reducing soybean production in the USA, thus encouraging an expansion of soybean production in Latin America, some in the Amazon; that the main beneficiaries of higher commodity prices are not necessarily small farmers in developing countries, but large landowners. And so forth.
On the other hand, there has certainly been some lively discussion on what biofuels might mean for Africa. In this article, for example, I presented the views of Biopact. (And, yes, got a lot of hard arguments in return.)
You speak of "the many tens of types of biofuels that are extremely efficient, benefit the environment, restore land and alleviate poverty on a vast scale". Jatropha curcas I presume is one example you have in mind? Perhaps jojoba? Producing biodiesel from these plants is labor-intensive, but if you mean they are energy-efficient, I think there is no argument there. I have also drawn attention to the possibilities of nipah (mangrove) palm.
But what other "tens of types" do you have in mind?
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justlou Posted 3:21 am
08 Aug 2007
The anecdote in the article you cite does illustrate how this is benefiting some people. But it also points out how biofuels are contributing to the destruction of forests in Indonesia. Long term, those people as well as people on the entire planet will be more dependent on the environmental services those Indonesian forests provide than any benefits that will be obtained in the short term by their conversion to energy plantations.
You ignore the issue about how biofuels are affecting food prices. From the article, "What About the Poor", I excerpt this quote:
"In the May/June 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs, C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer argue that a large-scale biofuels industry will harm developing nations, not help them (How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor). The authors flatly state that "if oil prices remain high -- which is likely -- the people most vulnerable to the price hikes brought on by the biofuel boom will be those in countries that both suffer food deficits and import petroleum." Just as with palm oil, the article argues that food prices will soar as crops are grown for the biofuels market. One of their examples is casava, which is an excellent ethanol source due to its high-starch content.
In the poorest parts of sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where cassava is a staple, its price is expected to increase by 33 percent by 2010 and 135 percent by 2020...
The production of cassava-based ethanol may pose an especially grave threat to the food security of the world's poor. Cassava, a tropical potato-like tuber also known as manioc, provides one-third of the caloric needs of the population in sub-Saharan Africa and is the primary staple for over 200 million of Africa's poorest people. In many tropical countries, it is the food people turn to when they cannot afford anything else. It also serves as an important reserve when other crops fail because it can grow in poor soils and dry conditions and can be left in the ground to be harvested as needed."
I don't think anyone on this site has argued that ethanol from sugar cane is adding to the destruction of the Amazon. I have argued that the US is contributing to the destruction of the Amazon by using more corn for ethanol. This has decreased US soybean production, raised the price of soybeans, and stimulated more production of soybeans in the Amazon.
What I have also written here and elsewhere is that the Cerrado in Brazil, a vast savanna ecosystem of 160,000 species, is under dire threat of expansion of cane and soybean production. This is proceeding at an alarming pace with a major input of US grain corporations and billionaire investors like George Soros.
So, tell me, how have you adopted the thinking of reactionary conservatives? Not by reading much detail in these or previous posts or any of the cited articles. Before you start assigning labels, you might want to bone up on a bit of history.
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Ron Steenblik Posted 3:28 am
08 Aug 2007
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justlou Posted 7:03 am
08 Aug 2007
Lou
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GreyFlcn Posted 7:09 am
08 Aug 2007
The reality is the little guy can never compete on global commodities.
Be it the third world or the first world.
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/49138
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/52073
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