“Even when the price of food was low, 850 million people went hungry because they could not afford to buy it. With every increment in the price of flour or grain, several million more are pushed below the bread line.” 

“If the governments promoting biofuels do not reverse their policies, the humanitarian impact will be greater than that of the Iraq war. Millions will be displaced and hundreds of millions more could go hungry.”

AN  AGRICULTURAL  CRIME  AGAINST  HUMANITY

     Biofuels could kill more people than the Iraq war.

By George Monbiot

It doesn’t get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and
receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute
food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made
from one of its staple crops, cassava(1). The government has allocated
several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the county of
Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought(2). It would
surely be quicker and more humane to refine the Swazi people and put them in
our tanks. Doubtless a team of development consultants is already doing the
sums.

This is one of many examples of a trade described last month by Jean
Ziegler, the UN’s special rapporteur, as “a crime against humanity”(3).
Ziegler took up the call first made by this column for a five-year
moratorium on all government targets and incentives for biofuel(4): the
trade should be frozen until second-generation fuels - made from wood or
straw or waste - become commercially available. Otherwise the superior
purchasing power of drivers in the rich world means that they will snatch
food from people’s mouths. Run your car on virgin biofuel and other people
will starve.

Even the International Monetary Fund, always ready to immolate the poor on
the altar of business, now warns that using food to produce biofuels “might
further strain already tight supplies of arable land and water all over the
world, thereby pushing food prices up even further.”(5) This week the UN
Food and Agriculture Organisation will announce the lowest global food
reserves in 25 years, threatening what it calls “a very serious crisis”(6).
Even when the price of food was low, 850 million people went hungry because
they could not afford to buy it. With every increment in the price of flour
or grain, several million more are pushed below the breadline.

The cost of rice has risen by 20% over the past year, maize by 50%, wheat by
100%(7). Biofuels aren’t entirely to blame - by taking land out of food
production they exacerbate the effects of bad harvests and rising demand -
but almost all the major agencies are now warning against expansion. And
almost all the major governments are ignoring them.

They turn away because biofuels offer a means of avoiding hard political
choices. They create the impression that governments can cut carbon
emissions and - as Ruth Kelly, the British transport secretary, announced
last week(8) - keep expanding the transport networks. New figures show that
British drivers puttered past the 500 billion kilometre mark for the first
time last year(9). But it doesn’t matter: we just have to change the fuel we
use. No one has to be confronted. The demands of the motoring lobby and the
business groups clamouring for new infrastructure can be met. The people
being pushed off their land remain unheard.

In principle, burning biofuels merely releases the carbon they accumulated
when they were growing. Even when you take into account the energy costs of
harvesting, refining and transporting the fuel, they produce less net carbon
than petroleum products. The law the British government passed a fortnight
ago - by 2010, 5% of our road transport fuel must come from crops(10) -
will, it claims, save between 700,000 and 800,000 tonnes of carbon a
year(11). It derives this figure by framing the question carefully. If you
count only the immediate carbon costs of planting and processing biofuels,
they appear to reduce greenhouse gases. When you look at the total impacts,
you find that they cause more warming than petroleum.

A recent study by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen shows that the official
estimates have ignored the contribution of nitrogen fertilisers. They
generate a greenhouse gas - nitrous oxide - which is 296 times as powerful
as CO2. These emissions alone ensure that ethanol from maize causes between
0.9 and 1.5 times as much warming as petrol, while rapeseed oil (the source
of over 80% of the world’s biodiesel) generates 1-1.7 times the impact of
diesel(12). This is before you account for the changes in land use.

A paper published in Science three months ago suggests that protecting
uncultivated land saves, over 30 years, between two and nine times the
carbon emissions you might avoid by ploughing it and planting biofuels(13).
Last year the research group LMC International estimated that if the British
and European target of a 5% contribution from biofuels were to be adopted by
the rest of the world, the global acreage of cultivated land would expand by
15%(14). That means the end of most tropical forests. It might also cause
runaway climate change.

The British government says it will strive to ensure that “only the most
sustainable biofuels” will be used in the UK(15). It has no means of
enforcing this aim - it admits that if it tried to impose a binding standard
it would break world trade rules(16). But even if “sustainability” could be
enforced, what exactly does it mean? You could, for example, ban palm oil
from new plantations. This is the most destructive kind of biofuel, driving
deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia. But the ban would change nothing.
As Carl Bek-Nielsen, vice chairman of Malaysia’s United Plantations Bhd,
remarked, “even if it is another oil that goes into biodiesel, that other
oil then needs to be replaced. Either way, there’s going to be a vacuum and
palm oil can fill that vacuum.”(17) The knock-on effects cause the
destruction you are trying to avoid. The only sustainable biofuel is
recycled waste oil, but the available volumes are tiny(18).

At this point the biofuels industry starts shouting “jatropha!” It is not
yet a swear word, but it soon will be. Jatropha is a tough weed with oily
seeds that grows in the tropics. This summer Bob Geldof, who never misses an
opportunity to promote simplistic solutions to complex problems, arrived in
Swaziland in the role of “special adviser” to a biofuels firm. Because it
can grow on marginal land, jatropha, he claimed, is a “life-changing” plant,
which will offer jobs, cash crops and economic power to African
smallholders(19).

Yes, it can grow on poor land and be cultivated by smallholders. But it can
also grow on fertile land and be cultivated by largeholders. If there is one
blindingly obvious fact about biofuel it’s that it is not a smallholder
crop. It is an internationally-traded commodity which travels well and can
be stored indefinitely, with no premium for local or organic produce.
Already the Indian government is planning 14m hectares of jatropha
plantations(20). In August the first riots took place among the peasant
farmers being driven off the land to make way for them(21).

If the governments promoting biofuels do not reverse their policies, the
humanitarian impact will be greater than that of the Iraq war. Millions will
be displaced, hundreds of millions more could go hungry. This crime against
humanity is a complex one, but that neither lessens nor excuses it. If
people starve because of biofuels, Ruth Kelly and her peers will have killed
them. Like all such crimes it is perpetrated by cowards, attacking the weak
to avoid confronting the strong.
REFERENCES:

1. IRIN Africa, 25th October 2007. Swaziland: Food or biofuel seems to be
the question. http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74987

2. Energy Current, 29th October 2007. Swaziland joins biofuel drive despite
mounting food crisis.
http://www.energycurrent.com/index.php?id=3&storyid=6359

3. Grant Ferrett, 27th October 2007. Biofuels ‘crime against humanity’. BBC
Online.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7065061.stm

4. George Monbiot, 27th March 2007. A Lethal Solution. The Guardian.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/03/27/a-lethal-solution/

5. Valerie Mercer-Blackman, Hossein Samiei, and Kevin Cheng, 17th October
2007. Biofuel Demand Pushes Up Food Prices. IMF Research Department.
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2007/RES1017A.htm

6. Jacques Diouf, quoted by John Vidal, 3rd November 2007. Global food
crisis looms as climate change and fuel shortages bite. The Guardian.

7. John Vidal, 3rd November 2007. Global food crisis looms as climate change
and fuel shortages bite. The Guardian.

8. Department for Transport, October 2007. Towards a Sustainable Transport
System:
Supporting Economic Growth in a Low Carbon World.
http://www.dft.gov.uk/about/strategy/transportstrategy/pdfsustaintranssystem
.pdf

9. Department for Transport, 2007. Transport Statistics Great Britain 2007.
Table 7.1. Road traffic by type of vehicle: 1949-2006
http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/statistics/datatablespublications/tsgb/2007edition
/sectionsevenroadsandtraffic.pdf

10. HM Government, 2007. The Renewable Transport Fuel Obligations Order
2007. http://www.opsi.gov.uk/SI/si2007/draft/20078818.htm

11. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, October 2007.
Biofuels - risks and opportunities, p4.
http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roads/environment/rtfo/289579

12. PJ Crutzen, AR Mosier, KA Smith and W Winiwarter, 1 August 2007. N2O
release from agro-biofuel production negates global warming reduction by
replacing fossil fuels. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions 7,
pp11191­11205.
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/7/11191/2007/acpd-7-11191-2007.pdf

13. Renton Righelato and Dominick V. Spracklen, 17th August 2007. Carbon
Mitigation by Biofuels or by Saving and Restoring Forests? Science Vol 317,
p902. doi 10.1126/science.1141361.

14. AFP, 17th October 2007. IMF concerned by impact of biofuels on food
prices. http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5h0RVoVwPFlD8MXLYyQbxHamr9NYw

15. Lord Bassam of Brighton, 29th March 2007. Parliamentary answer. Column
WA310.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200607/ldhansrd/text/70329w0004.h
tm

16. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, October 2007.
Biofuels - risks and opportunities, p5.
http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roads/environment/rtfo/289579

17. Benjamin Low, 24th February 2006. CPO Prices Seen Up In 06 As Biodiesel
Fuels Demand
http://sg.biz.yahoo.com/060224/15/3yy2x.html

18. You can see the calculations here:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/

19. Helene Le Roux, 27th July 2007. Singer, songwriter and activist promotes
green energy in Africa. Engineering News Online.
http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article.php?a_id=112872

20. John Vidal, ibid.

21. Mark Olden, 25th October 2007. Observations on: biofuels. New Statesman.
www.newstatesman.com/200710250020

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“About George Monbiot” is at:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2000/06/09/about-george-monbiot/