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Biofuel gangs kill for green profits
Tony Allen-Mills, The Sunday Times (UK)
HE survived decades of Colombia’s murderous guerrilla uprisings. He lived through paramilitary purges and steered well clear of the cocaine overlords who swarmed across his rural region. It was something completely different that killed Innocence Dias. He died because the world is turning green.
The global quest for alternative sources of environmentally friendly energy has attracted high-profile support from American politicians, including President George W Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California. Celebrities such as Daryl Hannah, the actress, and Willie Nelson, the country singer, are leading a campaign to promote green fuels.
Yet the trend has already had disastrous consequences for tens of thousands of peasants in rural Colombia. A surge in demand for biofuels derived from agricultural products has unleashed a chaotic land grab by a new breed of gangster entrepreneurs hoping to cash in on the world’s thirst for palm oil and related bioproducts.
Vast areas of Colombia’s tropical forest are being cleared for palm tree plantations. Charities working with local peasants claim that paramilitary forces in league with biofuel conglomerates – some of them financed by US government subsidies – are forcing families off their land with death threats and bogus purchase offers.
“The paramilitaries are not subtle when it comes to taking land,” said Dominic Nutt, a British specialist with Christian Aid who recently visited Colombia. “They simply visit a community and tell landowners, ‘If you don’t sell to us, we will negotiate with your widow’.”
(3 June 2007)
Related from the Guardian: Massacres and paramilitary land seizures behind the biofuel revolution
Contributor Alfred Nassim writes:
We have had the oil wars for some time. Now we have the biofuels equivalent.
Indonesia Won’t Allow Oil Palm Growers to Cut Forests
Leony Aurora and Arijit Ghosh, Bloomberg
Indonesia, the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, won’t allow oil palm growers to cut primary forests for establishing plantations, Minister for Environment Rachmat Witoelar said.
Per capita carbon dioxide emissions in the Southeast Asian nation, the biggest producer of the gas after the U.S. and China, is growing at a rate of 4 percent a year, compared with 3.5 percent in India and 2.7 percent in China, according to a report released yesterday by the World Bank.
Indonesia is trying to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, 75 percent of which results from deforestation. The country is set to overtake Malaysia this year as the world’s largest palm oil supplier and plans to add 1.5 million hectares of the crop over the next three years, the government said.
“Expansion of palm oil plantations will not be allowed to sacrifice natural forests,” Witoelar said in an interview in Bali yesterday. “They will be planted in lots that are already empty. There are plenty of these, 18 million hectares of them.”
(5 June 2007)
First food prices climb, now, beer?
Jana Shortal, KARE 11 News
The trade-offs will be many when it comes to increasing ethanol production. Corn production is being grown at warp speed these days to catch up with the demand for biofuels and keep up with the expectations for food.
Because of that, worry is brewing in Saint Paul.The bulk of those concerns lie on the shoulders of Summit Brewing Co. President Mark Stutrud.
“Of course we are affected by the focus on ethanol production,” Stutrud said. Fields of hops and barley, the spice and soul of beer, are getting replaced with rows and rows of corn.
“We have a shortage in terms of total acreage that is put in for barley production,” Stutrud said. With more breweries and less barley, that can only mean one thing.
“Obviously the price has really driven up due to demand and that all really goes back to that supply and demand curve we learned in high school,” Stutrud points out.
(2 June 2007)
Ethanol boom won’t threaten food supply [sic]: analysts
Todd Benson, Reuters
Fears of world food shortages caused by booming use of sugar cane and corn to produce ethanol fuel for motor vehicles are overblown and politically motivated, analysts and politicians said on Monday.
Ethanol producers in Brazil and the United States have been defending themselves from warnings by Cuban President Fidel Castro and his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chavez that growing use of biofuels will worsen hunger in the developing world by encouraging farmers to switch from food crops.
But many agronomists and global political leaders argue that the world has enough arable land to ramp up biofuel production without risking the food supply.
(4 June 2007)
An extraordinarily poor article to appear in a wire service (Reuters) and a major newspaper (Washington Post). The reporter merely transcribes quotes from experts and politicians with an obvious self-interest in ethanol. There is no attempt to dig deeper, to give background on the issue. Ten minutes spent on the Web will dredge up a wealth of information (and the archives of Energy Bulletin are bulging with articles on biofuels).
-BA
Fuelling price rises
Leader (editorial), The Guardian
There is, admittedly, a humorous side to the debate over biofuels. A story that involves rocketing pork prices in China, expensive Mexican tortillas and Philadelphian farmers feeding their livestock chocolate bars has enough comic material to keep an entire classroom in giggles. Yet this argument has a darker side, because the search by politicians for a way to bring down carbon emissions is driving up food costs and enouraging destruction of land.
It’s not hard to see why politicians are attracted to biofuels. On the one hand they have fossil fuels which are mucky and expensive. On the other there are plants such as corn, palm oil, sugar cane and other agricultural products, which are increasingly viable sources of energy. Put the two together and you get a biofuel bandwagon. The EU has a target that at least 10% of fuel will come from plants by 2020, while Gordon Brown greeted the authoritative report by Nicholas Stern last year by trumpeting his enthusiasm for biofuels (while bypassing the inconvenient fact that he had kept fuel duty frozen for years). Their most prominent supporter is George Bush, who laid out ambitious targets for their use in this January’s state of the union address.
This enthusiasm, however, is likely to come at a cost to the world’s poor. Diverting crops away from food into fuel runs the risk of increasing hunger for the poor. There are already some warning signs. Wholesale corn prices have rocketed, which caused 75,000 protesters to march through downtown Mexico City against dearer tortillas a few months ago. It has also made animal feed dearer, which has helped push up the cost of pork for the Chinese. Higher prices do not just affect poor countries, which is why American farmers are now feeding their herds Hersheys and pretzels, and Germans are upset to see beer prices go up as a result of a shortage of hops. But for China, still a developing country, to see the price of its staple meat rise 43% in the first three weeks of May alone is a much bigger hardship. In some cases the risk is of destruction of land. Palm oil is another potential biofuel, so farmers are chopping down forests to make way for palm trees. The conservationist Richard Leakey has warned that the orangutan is endangered by the drive for biofuels, while the UN has also shown green fuels the red light.
By adopting biofuels, politicians in rich countries effectively avoid taking harder, unpopular decisions, such as limiting consumption, either with tighter caps on emissions or higher taxes. They effectively push the problem of dealing with environmental damage on to the shoulders of the poor. However funny biofuels may sound, the politicians’ craze for them has serious side-effects.
(5 June 2007)
