The Biofuels Deception. Okbazghi Yohannes

outsourcing public services, recommodification of national assets such as parks and natural wilderness. But most important are subsidies, courtesy of the taxpayer and justified under the guise of enhancing international competitiveness, making exports cheaper vis-à-vis other countries. In 1997, the Earth Council released a comprehensive study detailing how the world was annually spending $700 billion subsidizing corporations to overuse water in countries where water tables were falling, to deplete fishery resources at a time when seventeen oceanic fishing grounds were showing signs of exhaustion, and to encourage the production and use of coal and fossil fuels at a time when climate change and sea-level rise were in evidence. Startled by the extent of the abuse and misuse of public resources, the authors of the study expressed their revulsion in these terms: “There is something unbelievable about the world spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually to subsidize its own destruction.”⁷⁷

      In essence, as geographers Deborah Cowen and Neil Smith correctly identified, the metropolitan state has now become a geo-economic social agent in the service of global corporations, resulting from the prevailing structural power of corporations, the total supression of the territorial logic of the state by the market logic of global functional integration, and the relative superannuation of geopolitics as a means of creating an exclusive constellation of client states.⁷⁸ In short, the market has completely and powerfully extricated itself from the state, and the state has been reduced to the sheer provision of enabling and legitimating services to the market.⁷⁹

      Similar transformations have occurred in the Global South, where relative developmentalism has become dysfunctional. As a result, states in the South have become fully transnationalized and locked into the neoliberalized global trading system, freezing the historic global division of labor. They simply mimic metropolitan states in their attempts to induce the relocation of international capital. India offers an illustrative case. Hiding behind health concerns, in 1998 India banned the processing of oils from indigenous mustard seeds by small-scale operations and allowed free entry of foreign soybean oil. Prior to the ban, hundreds of thousands of mustard-oil processers were self-employed in rural India. Tens of thousands of small crushers used to convert locally produced mustard seeds into low-cost edible oils that accounted for 68 percent of processed oils in India. But when free imports of soybean oil became official policy, these small operations and the people who depended on them for livelihoods were no more. In addition, the free entry of soybean oil became a Trojan horse for the introduction of GM soybean cultivation as India permitted big land owners to begin GM soybean monoculture production following the ban on processing of local mustard oils.⁸⁰

      The discussion in the preceding paragraphs supports the conclusion that there is no state intermediation to speak of under late capitalism to smooth over the contradictions between the logic of accumulation and the principles of sustainable scale, allocative efficiency, and social justice. The fundamental flaw in ecological economics stems from the failure to understand that questions of allocative efficiency, sustainable scale, and just distribution cannot be isolated from the political ecology of the capitalist mode of production.

      The long-term project to save capitalism from its deepening internal contradictions necessitates reframing bourgeois ideology to generate at least the illusion of consent. In the 1980s, for example, corporate intellectuals were put to work to refurbish bourgeois ideology into what has come to be known as neoliberalism. The obsessive preoccupation of neoliberalism now focused on changing the states in the Global South so that corporations from the core capitalist countries could take over assets such as state-run telecommunications, public enterprises, public utilities, etc., under the guise of promoting efficiency, accountability, and transparency through privatization, deregulation, and trade liberalization. The methodology employed in the 1980s was to remove the barriers to further accumulation in the metropolitan North. With the typical state in the Global South now subordinated to the requirements of global capitalism, the focus shifted to expanding the scope and scale of primitive accumulation through the acquisition of agricultural lands, forests, savannahs, wetlands, grasslands, and water resources, under the guise of promoting bioenergy security, poverty eradication, job creation, and rural development. If advanced capitalist states are to thwart an “Occupy Wall Street” type mass movement from escalating to full-scale social revolution, they have to devise new coping strategies. These survival strategies now come in the form of what David Harvey termed accumulation by dispossession. This involves the dispossession of millions of rural producers of their ancestral lands, and commercially enclosing forest, wetland, and water resources, followed by privatization and monopoly control over these resources, considered foundational to primitive accumulation. Where Karl Marx saw primitive accumulation as the historical precondition of capitalism based on wealth derived from non-capitalist modes of production, necessary for providing the initial yeast, David Harvey sees primitive accumulation in the Global South under late capitalism as the dominant reorganizing principle of capital, acquiring semi-permanent features, because expanded reproduction within capitalist countries through technological innovations and the social engineering of mass consumption has become increasingly problematic. The deepening crisis of overaccumulation has become a frightening prospect. So, just as early capitalist commodity production came into existence through savage dispossession, expropriation, plunder, enslavement, commercial enclosure, and colonization, contemporary capitalism has come to rely on the same means for its continued existence—by appropriating, commodifying, and marketizing hitherto uncommodified natural resources in the Global South.⁸¹ In this view, accumulation by dispossession, i.e., the appropriation of land and other natural resources under contemporary capitalism, requires the savage expulsion of peasant producers, followed by the commodification and privatization of land and other natural resources, conversion of public properties to private corporate assets, and suppression of all forms of rights. This involves not only the commercial enclosure of nature but also the privatization of politics and culture in the sense that they serve to lubricate the deepening process of accumulation by dispossession. It logically follows that accumulation by dispossession is a politically driven process. Harvey hastens to add that if expanded reproduction (based on the exploitation of wage labor) was the dominant mode of accumulation between 1945 and 1973, accumulation by dispossession has become the primary mode of capitalist accumulation since the 1970s, involving the colonization of hitherto uncolonized social spheres in the Global South. The latter requires outright expropriation, predation, deception, intimidation, mass expulsion of peasants and violence—the primary object being the completion of the divorce of people from the means of production.⁸²

      THE MANNER IN WHICH THE CONTEMPORARY land grab is taking place in the Global South supports the conclusion that accumulation by dispossession has become the primary contradiction of late capitalism. Since the commercial enclosure of nature in the advanced countries is almost total, the land and water resources to be stolen are primarily located in the Global South, mostly tropical Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, which are seen as the next sites for “green” oil and bio-based commodity production. The excitement in accumulation by dispossession has indeed led the biofuel-biotechnology industrial complex, global financial institutions, and corporate intellectuals to speculate that there are 445 million hectares of uncultivated land worldwide suitable for the cultivation of sugarcane, oil palm, soybeans, wheat, maize, and fast-growing, short rotation trees. Of this total, Africa is said to have 201 million hectares, Latin America 123.3 million hectares, and Southeast Asia 73 million hectares available for bioenergy and food production, enough to produce at least 245 exajoules (EJ) of energy a year by 2050. Other corporate analysts optimistically suggest that there could be as much as 2.2 billion hectares of land that could be devoted to tree plantations, perennial grasses, sugarcane plantations, and other bioenergy feedstock production with the capacity to generate many hundreds of EJ annually, replacing up to 27 percent of present global fossil energy consumption. This means conversion of at least 10 million hectares of land to bioenergy plantations every year until 2050 compared to the 4.5 million hectares of land that were put under crop cultivation every year between 1961 and 2007.⁸³

      It is within this context that the exceptionally ruthless land grabbing that has been occurring in the Global South since the beginning of this century must be understood. According to various sources, between 2000 and 2010, approximately 227 million hectares of land deals were struck or were under negotiation between land resource–rich countries and a constellation