Well butter my butt and call me a biscuit! Turns out global trade in ethanol disadvantages developing nations. Who coulda guessed.
What are the options open to developing nations? You think they'll just pull out of global ethanol trade, 'cause of how unfair it is?
Um, no. They'll raze their rainforests and carbon sinks, pushing and pushing to ramp up supply, running like hamsters on a wheel to squeeze what profit they can out of the global market. A small elite will be enriched, average citizens will see no benefit, and the end result will be worse global warming and global economic inequality.
This is the system we have. It's great to say you'd support global ethanol trade if safeguards were put in place to prevent such inequities from happening. But if history is any guide, such safeguards won't be put in place. So what then?
The real choice, then, is this: participate in the existing global trade system or push for genuinely clean, genuinely domestic power options.
URGE2. Is all I'm saying.
Comments
View as Threaded
Ron Steenblik Posted 7:37 am
29 Jan 2007
I noticed that in an earlier blog you expressed concern over the prospect of increasing imports of biofuels from, and therefore production in, developing countries. May I counsel a bit more circumspection?
For one, when criticizing developing countries for environmental damage caused by farming, we need to keep in mind that the North is not one big happy organic paradise either. Need I mention what U.S. sugar producers did to the everglades, and sodbusters on the Prairies, the expanding Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the loss of natural vegetation and soil salinization in Australia, and continued heavy agrochemical use in Europe? Increased production of corn for ethanol in the USA and rapeseed for biodiesel in Europe will very likely intensify environmental pressures in those regions.
Certainly, it is not good if Northern demand for biofuels ends up encouraging even more deforestation. (That is a particular danger for some countries planning big expansions of biodiesel based on palm oil). But there are some other sources of biofuels -- e.g., jatropha -- that could actually help restore land while providing income for some rather poor people.
Tariffs on imported biofuels are blunt instruments, and non-discriminatory. They keep out ethanol coming from well-managed cane operations (or, as I wrote earlier, mangrove palms), as well as ethanol from areas cleared of forest. That is the IIED report's main message.
High tariffs on ethanol could even have the perverse consequence of INCREASING pressure on the Amazon rainforest. In Brazil, the Amazon is being cleared not from cane production for ethanol (there is no commercial cane production in the Amazon), but from soybean production. If, as a result of a ramping up of corn production for ethanol, U.S. farmers cut back on the acres they plant to soy and export less of the bean, who's going to pick up the slack, eh?
Permalink