The most destructive force, however, has been the capitalist transformation of use value into exchange value, not necessarily to satisfy human needs but to further strengthen the process of accumulation. This phenomenon has led to the hyper-acceleration of production, whose demand for throughputs and sinks has proved beyond nature’s biocapacity to supply food, feed, fiber, and other throughputs. For example, the near exhaustion of nonrenewable resources is the background to the contemporary rush to divert more and more grains and oilseeds into biofuel production. This has led to the bifurcation of agriculture into chemical-dependent industrial agriculture, which produces most grains and commodities, and the agroecological mode of cultivation that supports the dispossessed mass farmers. Today, there are 500 million smallholder farmers in developing countries whose food production accounts for 15 to 20 percent of overall food production and yet feeds nearly 80 percent of the world’s population.24 These small farmers, for the most part, do not infringe upon the ecological relations of production, since they closely follow nature’s biocapacity to regenerate, employing practices such as retention of vegetation, integration of agroforests, integration of livestock into their farms, and reliance on organic inputs. Of course, the growth in their number, coupled with the fact that they are continually being pushed off to marginal areas by big industrial farmers, is interfering with the operation of the ecological relations of production.
To illustrate the extent of the migration of capital to biofuel, biochemical, and biomaterial production, following is a brief review of the impacts of industrial agriculture on the ecological relations of production from the perspective of ecological economics. The aim is to elucidate whether biofuels could contribute to poverty alleviation, climate change mitigation, and energy security without impacting the ecological relations of production.
Following the Second World War, the mechanical revolution in manufacturing was exported to the agricultural sector via capital’s increasing appropriation of land and water resources and the mechanization of agriculture. As a result, the conversion of forests, savannahs, grasslands, and wetlands into croplands, supported by extensive irrigation works and intensive use of synthetic inputs, grew to an unprecedented scale. Worldwide, the area put under cultivation between the 1950s and the turn of the century quadrupled, as a result of which overall annual world food production increased by 44 percent, while growth in cereals increased by 59 percent; of the 1,600 million hectares under production at the beginning of this century, 302 million hectares were equipped with irrigation, accounting for 40 percent of overall food production. The total area under cultivation is projected to increase by another 235 million hectares by 2050 (all of it in the Global South), which will produce 1 billion metric tons of additional cereals that will be needed to feed the new human arrivals, and grow the feedstocks that will be required to produce biofuels. Even though agribusiness interests and their supporters attempt to reassure us that 80 percent of the additional food production increases will come from intensification of production in the form of higher yield productivity and intensity of cropping, the projected additional grain supply would come only by converting more and more forests, savannahs, and grasslands into cropland. The reason is simple: the rates of growth in yield of the major food crops have long been falling alarmingly. For example, growth in wheat yields declined from about 5 percent a year in 1980 to 2 percent in 2005; yield growth in rice and maize dropped from more than 3 percent a year to 1 percent during the same period. Projecting into the future, yields of the major food crops will fall further to 0.8 percent per year by 2030 and to 0.5 percent per year by 2050. Owing to temperature warming, the overall agricultural output in developing countries could fall by 9 to 21 percent. The secular stagnation in the yields of the major crops is projected to result in real price increases of 59 percent for wheat, 78 percent for rice, and 106 percent for maize during the period between 2010 and 2050.25 Considering this objective reality, can the world produce sufficient biofuels to make a difference in the overall mix of energy without affecting global food supply and global food price? The answer is, of course, no.
In addition to the secular stagnations in yield productivity, the imponderable magnitude of the impacts of climate change and uncertainty in the patterns of rainfall on global food production still await a reckoning. Projections suggest that there could be a shortfall of 350 million metric tons of food grain by 2025 due to water shortages—a loss of grain equal to the total U.S. food grain produced in 2005.26 In addition to the decline in food grain production, another result of water shortages could be the disappearance of many species of grain and plants, representing substantial reductions of ecological resources with serious implications for the temporal and spatial evolution of nature. During the twentieth century alone, around 75 percent of plant genetic resources are estimated to have been lost, and a third of today’s diversity could be entirely wiped out by 2050. Between 1970 and 2010, the populations of freshwater, marine, and territorial vertebrate species were reduced by 52 percent.27
Notwithstanding the serial liquidation of ecological resources and the inexorable reduction of species populations, today 1.25 billion people live in absolute poverty; 768 million people have no access to safe and clean water; and 162 million children under five years of age are stunted or wasted.28 There is dark irony in this situation in that the proponents of biofuel-biotechnology use this grim reality to justify the further enclosure of nature, arguing for the production of more grain and feedstock through the gene revolution, which will then miraculously result in poverty alleviation and climate change mitigation. The truth is that the logic of capitalist accumulation and the resultant unequal distribution of resources and purchasing capabilities are responsible for the deplorable maelstrom of material deprivation, malnutrition, starvation, and hydro-destitution of hundreds of millions of people in the Global South (with growing numbers in the Global North). For instance, even though in 2010 the world had a food surplus that could have fed the entire human population one-and-a-half times, the FAO reported that there were 925 million people who were going to bed hungry every night. In 2011, there were forty-five countries with per capita yearly food consumption under $1,000, and fifteen of them were projected to remain stuck in stagnant poverty with less than $1,000 per capita yearly food consumption by 2050.29 This peculiar conundrum of concurrently having too much food and having too many hungry people who lack purchasing capabilities for the surplus food is a perfect illustration of the gross incongruity that exists between the capitalist mode of production, geared to the maximization of exchange value, and the imperatives of the ecological relations of production. Yet, agribusiness and metropolitan countries still intend to solve this fundamental contradiction in capitalist agriculture by diverting the surplus food to biofuels production. Of course, the hidden purpose masked by this rhetoric is, as we have seen, that the conversion of grains to biofuel production could simultaneously resolve the crisis in agricultural surplus production in industrial countries and the crisis of global energy shortages, as a result of which the continuous expansion of accumulation by dispossession would be put on a permanent course. Meanwhile, the fate of the hungry billions shall fade into oblivion.
The new dynamic of competition between food crops and biofuel production takes on an even more obscene dimension with the growing intensification of the capitalist mode of livestock production. By the turn of the twentieth century fully one-third of world grains and oil seeds were already being fed to livestock. Indeed, the liquidation of enormous ecological resources associated with the expansion of the global industrial food manufacturing system is being aggravated by the increase in the industrialization of the livestock mode of production, creating a shift in dietary habits in the Global South as more and more people imitate the Euro-American style of meat consumption. For example, since the 1980s, meat and egg consumption in the Global South increased twofold and fivefold, respectively.30 There is no mystery to this grim reality. Industrial mass livestock production occurring in conditions of land shortages, by definition, requires the diversion of land resources from human food crops to concentrated feed production, making food and feed direct competitors.