The Biofuels Deception. Okbazghi Yohannes

funds, Arab petrostates, and Asian industrializing countries. Of the 1,217 land deals officially registered, involving 83 million hectares, between one-third and two-thirds are estimated to have been dedicated to feedstock and biofuel production. Of these 83 million hectares, 56.6 million hectares of land auctioned off were in Africa and were equal to the combined cultivated area of Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. By some estimates, the extent of land resources sold or leased to foreign land grabbers could feed 1 billion people. Sixty-two percent of the land deals were in Africa, a continent known for severe famine and hunger. The cruel irony is that of the bioenergy feedstocks and food crops grown on these stolen land resources are destined for export.⁸⁴

      Insofar as the spectrum of biofuels production goes, a new map of bioenergy appears to be in the making. At the top of the hierarchy are the core biofuels countries controlling the supply of finance capital, biotechnologies, and organizational power. Countries in this category include the United States, Canada, members of the European Union, Japan, and Australia. Next come the intermediate biofuels countries, which are both recipients of finance capital and biotechnologies from the core and producers of biofuels in their own right. These are the classic semi-peripheral countries that have lately joined the G7 to form the G20, such as Brazil, Argentina, China, India, South Korea, Turkey, and South Africa. The intermediate biofuels countries occupy a strategic locus in the emerging global biofuels map, finding one of their feet in the core biofuels countries as recipients of finance capital and biotechnologies to develop their domestic biofuel industry, while they opportunistically fan the idea of south-south collaboration to ostensibly promote the collective interest of the Global South. This allows them to develop a Janus-like strategy to align their interests with those of the core biofuel countries to further their own biofuel industry and, at the same time, compete with the core countries in the periphery feedstock-supplying nations for biological resources. In the eyes of core countries and their corporations, the intermediate biofuel countries have credibility with periphery countries because of their public pretensions to speak on behalf of the amorphous Global South. In this, the intermediate biofuels countries supply the necessary bridge for the core to the periphery, and could be used as models to be emulated by the periphery. In the end, this boils down to the singular fact that both the core and intermediate biofuel countries are equal bio-vandalizers.

      At the bottom of the biofuel hierarchy are periphery feedstock-producing countries, such as Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Ecuador, Bolivia, Cambodia, Laos, and Papua New Guinea, where capital accumulation by geoecological vandalization and human dispossession has been most pronounced. Most of the land deals made in these countries are shrouded in secrecy. In 2008 and 2009 alone, 80 million hectares of land had been auctioned off to foreign corporations and foreign governments with two-thirds of the land deals in Africa. For example, China signed a 2.8-million hectares land deal with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for oil palm plantations, while South Korea got sweet land deals of 700,000 hectares in North Sudan and the United Arab Emirates got another 750,000 hectares in the same country. More than a third of Liberia’s, 48.8 percent of the DRC’s, 21 percent of Mozambique’s, and 10 percent of South Sudan’s productive lands were auctioned off to TNCs, hedge funds, and sovereign wealth funds. Most of the grains and bioenergy feedstocks grown in these countries had been destined for export to advanced countries and emerging markets.⁸⁵ At the root of this new scramble for land resources has been the competition between food, feed, biofuel, and industrial tree plantation sectors.

      

2

       The Biofuel Industrial Complex and Its Migration to the Global South

      Haunted by the specter of the Hubbert peak theory, which predicted the eventual depletion of petroleum energy, George W. Bush’s first act as president in February 2001was to establish a national energy task force, under the leadership of his vice president, Dick Cheney. The membership of the task force is still classified, but many analysts suspect that it was made up of high-powered oil tycoons and intellectuals from corporate-funded think tanks. The group’s mandate was to identify new areas where petroleum production could be expanded. Its recommendations are contained in eight chapters. According to the group’s collective speculations, by 2020 demand in the United States for natural gas, electricity, and oil would rise by 50 percent, 45 percent, and 33 percent respectively.¹ The package of recommendations included a call for the United States to accelerate domestic oil exploration and production while, at the same time, upgrading its presence in oil- producing regions, strengthening its ties with such key oil-producing states as Nigeria and Angola, and assisting U.S. oil transnationals to overcome obstacles to investment in foreign energy sectors.

      Coming on the heels of the oil task force, the unprecedented global oil price hikes during the first decade of this century seemed to give some credence to the task force’s overall conclusion about future fossil oil markets. It was against the backdrop of the Hubbert peak becoming a reality that the global biofuels industrial complex has given an extraordinary momentum to the expansion of primitive capital accumulation in the Global South through the conversion of living biological stocks into both liquid and solid fuels. In other words, with the apparent exhaustion of fossil fuels very much in prospect, both advanced and industrializing countries were increasingly looking to biofuels as complementary or alternative sources to fossil energy. To dramatize the long-term implications of exhaustion of nonrenewable fuels for the geo-economics of energy security, the IEA (International Energy Agency) heightened the concerns over the prospect of oil peak with the publication of Energy Technology Perspectives 2006, triggering a new scramble to complete the commodification of nature. Under a business-as-usual scenario, the IEA warned that by 2050 global demands for coal, natural gas, and petroleum would increase by 192 percent, 138 percent, and 65 percent, respectively. In consequence, global CO₂ emissions would increase by 130 percent by 2050. The IEA was, however, sanguine about the prospects of improving supply conditions and containing greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions by relying on nature’s capacity to furnish sufficient bioenergy. According to its bold assertion, bioenergy, depending on the pace of the technological revolution, could supply up to a 26,000 million ton oil equivalent (Mtoe) by 2050. Even if the pace of technological progress lags demand, the supply of biofuels could be in the range of 6,000 to 12,000 Mtoe a year, requiring the devotion of 20 percent of world farmland to bioenergy feedstock production. If the IEA’s speculations come to pass, the share of road transportation biofuels alone would rise from 19 Mtoe in 2007 to 57 Mtoe by 2015, and then to 102 Mtoe by 2030. With generous state subsidies and technological breakthroughs, the share of road biofuels could actually rise to 164 Mtoe in 2015 and then to 778 Mtoe by 2030.² Those were the predictions in 2007. In fact, though, the most recent IEA report shows that road biofuels consumption had exceeded predictions and had already risen to 396 Mtoe by 2015.³

      It is against the context of such projections that countries and corporations began looking to biological resources as a source of bioethanol and biodiesel fuels, to continue limitless capitalist growth and to overcome the crisis of overaccumulation as well—effected under the veneer of emission reductions, poverty eradication, and energy independence. Indeed, the early exuberance regarding the prospects of biofuels was so irrational that the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) made a projection of world liquid biofuels consumption rising to 112.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per day or 238 exajoules (EJ) per annum by 2030, of which 60 percent will be consumed by the road transport sector.⁴ Buoyed by such fanciful projections, by 2010, ninety-six countries had adopted bioenergy programs, another sixty countries had instituted biofuels mandates, and thirty countries were contemplating doing the same.⁵

      The 105 billion liters of biofuels produced in 2011 comprised 3 percent of global road transport fuels, produced from feedstocks grown on 3 percent of global farmland. While the United States accounted for 63 percent of global bioethanol production using corn as feedstock, Brazil was responsible for 24 percent, using sugar. With respect to biodiesel, the European Union was the leader, controlling 53 percent of total production, followed by the United States with 15 percent, and Brazil and Argentina each producing 13 percent.⁶ First-generation