The Biofuels Deception. Okbazghi Yohannes

food, feed, and biofuels occurs in the context of projected global population growth, and the rising income of the middle class in emerging markets, who demand more food and more meat products. In a nutshell, the addition of biofuels to the competition between food and feed can only worsen the stark state of the global ecology and climate. In 2005, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report, comprehensively and meticulously prepared by 1,300 world scientists, pointed out that fifteen (60 percent) of the twenty-four ecosystems they evaluated were being exploited at or beyond their regenerative biocapacity. The annual cost of lost ecosystems and biodiversity associated with the competition between food and feed was already in the range of $2 trillion and $4.5 trillion, a magnitude that will go up with the addition of biofuels.⁴⁹

      There are three risks associated with biofuel production as the third competitor for throughputs. First, as the land resources grow scarce because of the competition between the three production sectors, extremely valuable ecosystems will be vulnerable to commodification and commercial enclosure, short-circuiting the provision of essential ecosystem services. For the world to secure 10 percent of transport fuels from biofuel production by 2030, between 118 million and 505 million hectares of new cropland must be found to grow the required feedstocks, compared to the 38 million hectares of cropland used for feedstock production in 2008. This is equal to between 8 and 36 percent of the world’s existing cropland. Note that at the current rate of cropland acquisition required to meet the growing demands for land resources, between 320 million and 850 million hectares of forests, savannahs, and grasslands would have to be converted to cropland by 2050, which is equal to the combined size of Indonesia, Ethiopia and Brazil. On top of this, other sectors of the global economy will continue to put additional pressure on the land resource base. For example, infrastructures, urban expansion, and settlements are projected to increase by between 260 million and 420 million hectares by 2050, encroaching upon agriculture. In the past, around 80 percent of urban expansion occurred at the expense of agricultural land. Furthermore, the area dedicated to biomaterial production is expected to increase by up to 215 million hectares by 2050. In addition to the stridently continuing ambition and determination of biofuel peddlers to secure ever-growing quantities of feedstocks, developing countries are desperate to secure more cropland to grow food to avoid hunger and alleviate poverty, as well as to narrow the gap in global inequality. In India, for example, where 52 percent of the population live in poverty and 45 percent of children under five are stunted or wasted, the metabolic rate of natural resource appropriation is a mere 4.6 metric tons per person per year compared with 25 metric tons in Canada. This grim reality compels India to seek more arable land to grow needed food. So the pressure of cropland expansion, land competition, land intensification, and land-use change on ecosystems and climate is not hard to imagine. Second, since the feedstocks used for biofuel production are also used to produce food and feed, the resulting competition will drive food prices upward, hurting most particularly the poor, who spend 50 to 80 percent of their income on food. Third, as we shall see in later chapters, biofuel production is water-intensive at both the cultivation and processing levels, thus competing not only with food and feed production but also with human needs for drinking and cleaning. Moreover, land-use change from clearing vegetation and reactive nitrogen mobilization to boost feedstock production present a double jeopardy in terms of ghg emissions and nitrogen pollution of water expressed in acidification and eutrophication of important hydrological systems. Note that 20 percent of carbon emissions in the 1990s were directly related to land-use change.⁵⁰

      Even though the green revolution has resulted in impressive gains, as key to the construction of the global food manufacturing system it prepared the conditions for unsustainable land competition, soil degradation, soil erosion, nutrient pollution, salinization, eutrophication, agrochemical contamination, biodiversity loss and ghg, all related to land-use change, intensification of industrial agriculture, exorbitant reactive nitrogen mobilization, and monopolization of irrigation.⁵¹

      As food, both feed and biofuels compete for lands and water resources; the first casualties are forests, savannahs, grasslands, and wetlands, which are not only repositories of ecological resources and genetic materials, but also regulators of climate, carbon stores, and providers of food and shelter to countless species. Indeed, the context for the exhaustion and degradation of many ecosystems has been that over 500 million hectares of forests, savannahs, and grasslands were converted to agriculture and pasture between 1962 and 2006 in the Global South, at a time when industrial countries lost 54 million hectares of cropland to urban and suburban sprawl, as well as transportation and communication infrastructure. The global pulp and paper industry, which still annually devours over 400 million metric tons of forest resources, has already been one of the major drivers of deforestation, something that will grow worse as more woody bioenergy plants are targeted by the biofuel-industrial complex for conversion to so-called second-generation biofuels and wood pellets.⁵² The unsavory result of the increasing conversion of forests, savannahs, grasslands, and wetlands to cropland to grow the throughput required by food, feed, and biofuels entails the conditions of accelerating landscape denudation and ghg emissions from both land-use change and soils carbon oxidation.

      One little understood factor is the role of soils in the sequestration of carbon. In fact, the amount of carbon stored in soils is far greater than that stored in vegetation. When forests are clear-cut, the soils are immediately exposed to erosion by wind and water, as well as to compaction, solar radiation, and desiccation, inducing the release of carbon into the atmosphere. The consequent soil degradation is reflected in a linear fashion in the degradation of cropland, inducing more deforestation and more soil perturbation. In the past half-century, 50 percent of world agriculture had been affected by erosion, nutrient depletion, biological degradation, and compaction due to massive loss of vegetation and the consequent soil agitation. The upshot has been doubling down on the conversion of more forests, savannahs, grasslands, and wetlands into cropland to make up for reduced soil fertility and falling crop production. This has come at the expense of further soil degradation. At the beginning of the new century, 38 percent of world agriculture, excluding permanent pastures and woodlands, was found to have been severely degraded. In all, 1.2 billion hectares of land were found to have been severely degraded and another 700 million hectares lightly degraded, leading to a loss of 75 billion metric tons of soil to erosion annually. As a result, 5–12 million hectares of cropland were abandoned every year since the 1960s due to soil degradation. Moreover, approximately 70 percent of the dry lands used for agriculture worldwide was deemed degraded and was on the verge of desertification by the turn of the twentieth century. It is estimated that soil degradation affects more than a billion people in 100 countries. Indeed, more than 135 million people could be forced to migrate elsewhere from their homelands due to soil degradation and desertification, with 60 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa alone. Between 1960 and 2000, 43 percent of Africa’s cropland and 70 percent of overall economic activity were severely affected by soil degradation and desertification. Notwithstanding this deplorable reality, the biofuel hawkers see Africa as the new green oil El Dorado. The demand for land in Africa in 2009 alone, punctuated by corporate land grabbing, was equal to the cropland expansion that occurred during the previous twenty years.⁵³

      Against the backdrop of cropland degradation and the continuing competition between food, feed, and biofuels for new land resources, capitalists are moving to high-value ecosystems, exemplified by the grim state of peatland rainforests in Indonesia. The disruption of peat soils is particularly perilous because they consist of compressed and concentrated organic material, accumulated over centuries, and are supersaturated with carbon. Even though the area of peatlands worldwide covers 4 million square kilometers, representing only 3 percent of the earth’s surface, they store approximately 528 billion metric tons of carbon, equal to 75 percent of the carbon currently in the atmosphere. Notwithstanding the dangerous consequences of converting the peatland rainforests to oil palm plantations, Indonesian elites and transnational corporations have begun plundering this delicate ecosystem, largely prompted by growing European demand for biodiesel. When the government’s and corporate plans run their course, the area of peatlands and pristine rainforests converted to oil palm plantations in Indonesia will, by 2050, have grown from 9 million hectares in 2010 to 45 million hectares.⁵⁴

      For transnational corporations, however, the plunder of natural resources like the peatland rainforests is the raison d’être of accumulation, which they