Anthropogenic-driven climate change is the second Trojan horse that TNCs have cleverly used to market biofuels as the long-awaited answer to the crisis of overaccumulation. Even a multitude of bourgeois non-governmental organizations, which long had fought for reduction in ghg emissions, have been won over to biofuels as the palpable solution, even though some of them have now backed off from their earlier enthusiasm. Former U.S. vice president Al Gore, through his well-received documentary An Inconvenient Truth, has been the leading spokesperson for various environmental groups that saw biofuels as climate- and environment-friendly.
The elimination of global poverty is the third Trojan horse. The TNCs have linked biofuel production to global poverty eradication. A sinister machination is at work here. Since most of the required feedstocks, either through the commercial enclosure of forests, savannahs, and grasslands or through direct conversion of existing agricultural land to feedstock production, are found in the Global South, specialization in biofuel production must be conveniently linked to poverty eradication. As the corporate narrative goes, developing nations could avoid importing costly petroleum by simply producing biofuels domestically to run their transport vehicles. Moreover, they could significantly increase precious foreign exchange by exporting feedstocks, and the rural population would immensely benefit since they are the real producers and suppliers of these resources. The employment multiplier effect could be enormous as feedstock growers, rural workers, transporters, and processers could increase in parallel with the expansion of the biofuel sector.
The counter-narrative I have developed in this book posits that the contemporary debate over the role of biofuels in the global economy is not about global energy and food security or about the challenges of global climate change. The biofuels revolution now being advanced by global corporations, their supporting governments, and corporate researchers will not produce national or global energy security, nor will it reduce global emissions or alleviate poverty anywhere. The underlying motivation of those who call for biofuels is not to solve energy and food shortages or reduce climate change. Rather, the goal is to resolve the anarchy of agricultural production in the Global North, brought about by the green revolution and the consequent transformation of agriculture into a food-manufacturing system during the second half of the twentieth century—a transformation made possible by integration with the petroleum industry. After all, the original pioneering champions of biofuels were not petroleum corporations or even governments concerned about disruptions in petroleum supply conditions, but rather global grain-trading corporations bedeviled by surplus grain on the world market causing extreme price volatility. Until the beginning of the new century, the major global grain-trading corporations had been befuddled by a perplexing paradox in the global food market. There was more food than needed by the affluent people in the rich nations, and much less than needed by those in the poor countries, where purchasing power was too low to buy the surplus food.
It was in this context that the idea of converting grain to biofuels was born. The overarching aim of agribusiness corporations, like Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Cargill, Bunge, and Louis Dreyfus, was to make all grains flexible. Grains could be used as human food and animal feed when prices are high enough to sustain corporate profit, or as feedstocks for biofuel production when global grain market conditions experienced fluctuations. Thus the competition between grains for human food and animal feed, on the one hand, and grains for biofuels on the other, could eliminate extreme volatility in prices. It must be borne in mind that the crises of industrial overcapacity, overaccumulation, and mass unemployment have not been confined to manufacturing. Metropolitan agricultural interests have long experienced similar secular stagnation in grain markets due to surplus production, while people in the Global South continue to endure stark poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. To state it differently, the origins of agricultural surplus production in North America and Western Europe are rooted in the transformation of agriculture into food manufacturing, wholly dependent on the petroleum industry for external inputs such as synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and fossil fuels for trucks, tractors, water pumps, and heating and cooling facilities. The European aphorism of “lakes of milk and mountains of cheese” tells the whole story of the crisis in agricultural overproduction. It was no accident that the original notion of converting grains into biofuels arose in the headquarters of ADM, when corporate managers urged policy makers to induce transitioning from petroleum dependency to biofuels under the rubric of the urgent need to diversify the country’s energy portfolio in light of the oil shocks of the 1970s.
An important upshot of the drive for biofuels has been the coalescence of the global grain-trading oligopolies and the emergent biotechnology corporations, which boosted grain production in the Global North on an unprecedented scale, resulting in the crisis of agricultural surplus production, and market volatility for grain traders. At the same time, people in the Global South lacked purchasing capabilities to absorb the surplus food, compounding the crisis of overproduction. In this context, the diversion of the surplus grain into liquid biofuel production would transform all grains into flexible raw materials that could be used for either food or fuels, thus overcoming the crisis of agricultural surplus production. Biotechnology corporations, however, found the stiff opposition by the public to engineered crops a formidable impediment to accumulation. Therefore, they found it convenient to link genetically manipulated (GM) crop production to the growing requirement of feedstocks for biofuel production. In addition, the competition between food and the supposed green fuels was expected to engender scarcity, thereby creating propitious conditions for using the emergent scarcity as a way to penetrate the global food market.
The convergence of interests between the grain-trading oligopolies and the biotech corporations led to the formation and consolidation of the biofuel-biotechnology industrial complex. This entity was determined to employ the triple crises in global poverty, global energy uncertainty, and global warming to shape and reshape the global food manufacturing system in ways that could purportedly solve the crisis of agricultural surplus production and, at the same time, find new outlets for the deployment of the overaccumulated capital. To effectively market this overarching corporate aim, the biofuel-biotechnology peddlers continued to refine their presentation of biofuels as offering climate mitigation, poverty alleviation, and energy security.. To do so, they not only rely on the mobilization of internal propaganda and financial resources but also on a galaxy of researchers, social climbers, academics, and opinion-molders. The latter, with unpardonable vanity, economic opportunism, and cravings for social recognition, had no difficulty transforming intellectual promiscuity into fungible equity, perpetually nurtured by towering expectations of promotion