Concomitant with the consolidation of the biofuel-biotechnology industrial complex has come a climactic confrontation between two powerful visions of the future of the global food ecology—indeed, the future of humanity and nature itself. For analytical simplicity, I cast these as agroecology versus the green/gene revolution–driven agri-food complex. Agroecology juxtaposes the advantages and the development and sustainability goals that could be had from preserving and promoting regional and locally based strategies of diverse agriculture against the homogenization of the global food ecology, foundational to food security. On the other hand, the new global bio-masters boldly propose that the only way to feed the growing global population is through the acceleration of the green and gene revolutions, the requisite condition for generating surplus grains to produce biofuels that will simultaneously meet global energy requirements and contain global climate change.
Fewer things today make one cringe more than hearing advocates of biofuels invoke the image of inexhaustible biotic resources for making a smooth transition to a post-petroleum bio-economy with no harmful long-term consequences for the environment, climate, and the livelihoods of billions of people. The endless barrage of corporate propaganda tells us that, once the transition is made from the mechanical revolution that gave us the fossil-based capitalist civilization to the new frontier of green capitalism, the world will have continuous supplies of food, biofuels, biochemicals, bioplastics, and other varieties of biomaterials. The truth, however, is that these conditions are precisely what will make competition between food and biofuels unavoidable, worsening, not alleviating, the plight of the global poor. What looms even larger is the fact that the price hikes for grains, ineluctably arising from the competition between food and biofuels, will mean the dispossession of the land of large numbers of peasants and indigenous peoples in the Global South, to make way for large-scale commercial monocultivation.
The historical lesson to keep in mind is that the reason why billions of people in the Global South cannot access the world’s food surplus is that they have neither the purchasing capabilities nor the land resources to produce their own food because they have been stripped of their biosocial spaces. In this sense, inequality and poverty are historically and socially constructed. The crocodile tears that corporate managers shed for the plight of the global poor are simply public relations ploys. The corporate claim that biofuels will mitigate climate change is equally facile. As we shall see in later chapters, biofuels and the use of biomass for electricity and heat generation will not reduce global climate change. The conversion of forests, savannahs, grasslands, and wetlands into cropland to produce more grain to satisfy the competing demands for biofuels and human food requirements, the massive application of synthetic fertilizers to boost grain production, the processing of the grains using massive quantities of energy, the transportation of the biofuels to the market, and burning the biofuels in vehicles will aggravate, rather than ameliorate, emissions of CO2, nitrous oxide, and other gasses into the atmosphere. The constant invocations of global energy insecurity, global food shortages, and looming climate change are simply aimed at deflecting popular resistance to and intellectual contestation of the conversion of grains to liquid fuels to grease and run the machine of capitalism. Thus my purpose in this book is to closely examine the ideological foundation and empirical presentations of what the proponents of the post-petroleum bio-based capitalist civilization call a paradigm shift in world energy production and consumption. My purpose is not revelation, for there is nothing left to reveal, but rather interpretation and refutation of the dangerously faulty ontological description and gross epistemological misrepresentation of nature’s biocapacity to furnish what the peddlers in biofuel production and biotechnology propose. My intention is to make a modest contribution toward the development and refinement of the counterhegemonic epistemology of agroecology, a crucial precondition for food security and climate change reduction.
Admittedly, the difficulties of doing so are compounded and confounded by the fact that the global bio-masters have adroitly integrated global food, biofuel, and biopharmaceutical production as the indivisible components of a singular bio-revolutionary process. The corporate anthem of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) promises to “feed, fuel and heal the world” by unlocking the biological mystery of nature, using new bioinventions and bio-innovations.6 Representing over 1,100 biotech organizations, BIO has been feverishly busy selling the idea of a world with infinite potential to produce food for everyone, green fuel to drive all stationary or moving machines or flying vehicles, and drugs to treat and cure all kinds of diseases. To this end, the biotech industry has deployed large brigades of bio-evangelists of enormous pedigrees to bring the new tidings to all.
This is how the corporate managers shed their crocodile tears: Worrying about starving future generations won’t feed them. Food biotechnology will. The world’s population is growing rapidly, adding the equivalent of a China to the globe every ten years. To feed these billions more mouths, we can try extending our farming land or squeezing greater harvest out of existing cultivation. With the planet set to double in numbers around 2030, this heavy dependency on land can only become heavier. Soil erosion and mineral depletion will exhaust the ground. Land such as rainforest will be forced into cultivation. Fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide use will increase globally. At Monsanto, we now believe food biotechnology is a better way forward. Our bioseeds have naturally occurring beneficial genes inserted into the genetic structure to produce—say—insect or pest resistance crops. The implications for sustainable development of food production are massive; less chemicals use in farming, saving scarce resources, more productive yields, disease resistance crops. While we have never claimed we have solved world hunger at a stroke, biotechnology provides one means to feed the world more effectively.7
The biofuel-biotechnology industrial complex and their corporate intellectuals have woven a tapestry of falsehoods into a seemingly coherent body of enticements, intent on presenting food crop cultivation and biofuel production as complementary processes mediated by the gene revolution. They tell us ad nauseam that genetically manipulated seeds will be immune to biotic and abiotic stressors since they will be drought and cold tolerant and disease-resistant; that they can produce bountifully greater yields of high nutritional value crops while conserving soil and using less fertilizers and pesticides; that the resistance to weeds contained within the GM seeds themselves will decrease the need for repeated application of chemical herbicides; and the resistance to pests will enable farmers to avoid the application of costly pesticides that may otherwise contaminate the environment. They even promise to engineer seeds and plants that can directly fix nitrogen from the atmosphere, thereby eliminating the need for synthetic fertilizer application altogether. Given this master narrative, it should not come as a surprise that biotech corporations acquired, between 2008 and 2010, sixty-one patents for droughttolerant crops.8 However, the underlying reason for all of this is the unyielding necessity for capital accumulation, with all that implies for workers and peasants. Against the backdrop of the corporate effort to reduce the crisis of capital overaccumulation to the triple crises in food, energy, and climate change, it is crucially important to point out the singular fact that these crises are only a microcosmic manifestation of the general crisis of what David Harvey calls the crisis of overaccumulation in the core capitalist countries. So a focus on the food, energy, and climate crises can only serve as a segue into the examination of capitalist production itself and its nefarious consequences.9
Since the biofuel-biotechnology peddlers have cleverly presented food and fuel production and climate change mitigation as indivisible goals, any scrutiny of their claims must be grounded in a larger epistemological framework. A focus on biofuels as antithetical to food production alone could be diversionary and reductionist unless the counter-epistemology is anchored in the larger context of capitalist civilization. Therefore, I will challenge the bedrock ideological foundation of