The Biofuels Deception. Okbazghi Yohannes

American–style meat production requires three to four times as much land, and two to four times as much reactive nitrogen fertilizers. It was no coincidence that most of the 45 percent of temperate deciduous forests, 27 percent of tropical forests, 70 percent of grasslands, and 50 percent of the savannahs converted to agriculture during the twentieth century was accounted for by the relentless expansion of the livestock mode of production.³¹

      During the second half of the twentieth century in particular, industrialization of the livestock mode of production paralleled the industrialization of the green revolution–driven production of grain cereal and oilseed. By the beginning of the 1990s, 1.7 million metric tons of grains and oilseeds were fed to livestock, augmented by the conversion of 275 million hectares of forests and savannahs to planted pastures. By the turn of the twentieth century, 70 percent of grain in the United States had already been fed to livestock. The feed crops grown on 130 million hectares of U.S. cropland could have fed 400 million hungry people. If the entire livestock sector worldwide were to revert to the natural grass-based mode of livestock production, large amounts of grain could be freed, enough to meet the nutritional needs of one billion hungry people.³² However, doing so would be antithetical to the overriding obsession with capital accumulation by bio-vandalization and human dispossession.

      The driving force behind the intensification of the capitalist mode of livestock production has been what Jeremy Rifkin calls the “steers complex,” where vast swaths of forests, savannahs, and cropland are converted to planted pastures and specific feedcrop production to supply animal feed to the rapidly proliferating feedlots in the Global North.³³ The unprecedented expansion of planted pastures and soybean monocultivation in Latin America was behind this drive for centralization and concentration of the livestock mode of production. In Brazil, for example, the area under soybean monocultivation soared from 23 million hectares in 2005 to 42 million hectares in 2014, and is projected to soar to 100 million hectares at the expense of frontier forests and savannahs.³⁴ Bilateral and multilateral lending institutions in the Global North have aided the transformation of traditional grass-based to industrial livestock production. Between 1971 and 1977 alone, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank doled out $3.5 billion in loans and technical assistance to big commercial cattle producers in Latin America. Predictably, privileging feedcrop production over human needs has had a deleterious impact on the availability and accessibility of grains for human consumption. In Mexico, sorghum (historically unknown in the country) displaced corn production in many localities in order to meet the growing demand for sorghum as animal feed. Moreover, in the 1960s, a mere 6 percent of the Mexican corn was fed to cattle, growing to 33 percent by 1990, reducing the corn available for tortilla production, the staple of Mexican diet. While the urban elite and landed aristocracy deepened their meat-based lifestyle, millions of dispossessed Mexicans found themselves thrown into the maelstrom of material deprivation and urban squalor or perilous international migration.³⁵

      In sum, what the migration of capital to biofuel production does is triangulate the traditional competition between human food and animal feed by adding biofuel to the mix since the amounts of grains and oilseeds going into biofuel production must be subtracted from food and feed, or more forests, savannahs, and grasslands must be converted to cropland to grow feedstocks. Even worse, the simultaneous diversion of food crops and conversion of virgin ecological resources to biofuel production could grow exponentially just as the demand for the same resources by the global livestock sector is projected to grow exponentially. According to the FAO, global meat production is expected to grow from 229 million metric tons in 2001 to 465 million metric tons by 2050, while that of milk is projected to grow from 580 million metric tons to 1.043 billion metric tons. Correspondingly, the additional demand for feed crop is expected to increase by over one billion metric tons by 2050, and the additional pastures required to support the growing number of the livestock population will be 5.4 million square kilometers.³⁶

      From the point of view of the ecological relations of production, the rise in the global livestock population, the methods by which livestock is raised, the amount of plant biomass appropriated for the livestock sector, and the services required to support them will have severe implications for the state of climate, environment, and hydrology. As bio-economists Nathan Pelletier and Peter Tyedmers computed, if the current trends in industrial livestock production continue until 2050, the safe operating space for greenhouse gas emissions occupied by the livestock sector will increase by 70 percent, while biomass appropriation for the livestock population will increase by 88 percent and synthetic nitrogen mobilization by 294 percent, expressed in a cascade of deforestation, environmental degradation, ghg emissions, and freshwater depletion.³⁷ These conditions are bound to worsen as many developing countries continue to imitate the patterns of advanced countries in industrial livestock production and heavy meat consumption, entailing conversion of forests, savannahs, grasslands, and wetlands into cropland for commercial concentrate animal feed production. The 1,543 million metric tons of grain cereals, pulses, brans, oil cake, oil crops, and roots and tubers that were fed to livestock in 2005 are projected to double by 2050.³⁸ The amount of cereals and coarse grains directly appropriated to feed the additional global livestock population in 2050 is an amount that could be enough to feed an extra 4 billion people.³⁹ Thus, analysis of the livestock mode of production relative to the ecological relations of production supplies additional evidence to illustrate how the dynamic interactions between economic forces and the laws of evolutionary biology and thermodynamics operate. As the first law of thermodynamics states, nothing is created out of nothing; to create something, a given unit of throughput must be taken out of the general stock of natural resources for conversion into goods and wastes. The scale of the throughput taken out of the general stock of natural resources determines whether the sustainability and status of the general ecological stock is maintained. If the unit of throughput being used falls within the regenerative capacity of the natural environment, then the law of sustainable scale is respected. However, as noted earlier, in addition to worsening the triangulation of competition for grains and oilseeds and hence for land and water resources, the industrial livestock revolution has already contributed immensely to the erosion of the ecological relations of production. This violates the fundamental principle of sustainable scale in three crucial ways.

      First, to set up animal farm operations, land must be cleared of vegetation; the sorts of ecosystem services provided by the natural vegetation are discounted in terms of the future or not counted at all. Today, livestock grazing already occupies 26 percent of the earth’s ice-free land surface, while 33 percent of agriculture is devoted to feed-crop production, well beyond sustainable scale. This suggests that the ecological impact per unit of livestock production must be cut by 50 percent just to decrease the damage to the ecology beyond the present level. Note that the livestock revolution is responsible for converting 70 percent of previously forested land in the Amazon to pastures. Worldwide, 20 percent of pastures and 73 percent of rangelands had already been degraded by the turn of the twentieth century due to overgrazing, livestock action, and soil compression or compaction. In the United States, for example, the livestock sector is responsible for 55 percent of all soil erosion and sedimentation, 37 percent of pesticide use, 50 percent of antibiotic use. and 33 percent of freshwater pollution and contamination with nitrogen and phosphorus loads. All told, over a period of forty-four years since 1962, 270 million hectares of forests were converted to pastures, and 120 million hectares more are projected to be converted to pastures before 2050.⁴⁰ The expansion of the livestock sector above the level of sustainable scale has no doubt immensely contributed to the radical alteration of the ecology. It is no surprise that the livestock sector is recognized as the major driver of biodiversity loss through deforestation, fragmentation, land degradation, pollution, livestock-induced climate change, sedimentation of wetlands, and the facilitation of invasive species. In fact, 306 of the 825 ecoregions in the world across all biomass and biogeographies are said to be threatened by livestock. Of the thirty-five global areas in significant danger for biodiversity loss, twenty-three are said to be adversely affected by livestock production.⁴¹

      Second, the livestock sector puts too much waste into the environment and the atmosphere, far beyond the waste-processing capacity of nature. In part, this stems from the industrial intensification of livestock production, resulting in the excessive concentration of their waste in limited areas instead of being usefully spread