Is agrofuel bad for the climate?
By Valerie Lewis
In a recent Washington Post article we learn that governments all across Africa are putting their farmlands up for lease. In particular Ethiopia, currently quite green, is being leased to Indians, Chinese, Arabs, and whichever Big Agribiz can afford it. As a consequence there is a big rush to acquire African farmlands in order to produce whatever crops the Agricultural Moguls wish to grow, using cheap Ethiopian labour, and of course child labour. Now it would be nice to think that Ethiopians apart from those in power might derive some benefit from this development, but what we effectively have is a modern day equivalent of a fiefdom.
All this of course is likely to include no protection in the leases and be open to abuse and corruption, and eventually, ‘Big Agriculture’ being so oil-dependant won’t be sustainable. It will entirely destroy what is left of the natural environment and degrade the landscape.
Lessons learned in parched Australia and elsewhere with acid and salt ridden soils and loss of waterways are not being learned, and instead the monocultures are being exported to unsuspecting third world countrysides.
And one might well wonder about what might be grown. While a lot of it will probably produce food for feeding livestock destined for the wealthy of other countries (see the "Livestock's Long Shadow" report by the UN discussed in What we eat affects the world and its population), there is a strong possibility that much of it will also be used to grow agrofuel.
Canola, which is often genetically engineered, is one of several monoculture crops used for agrofuel production. Image: www.sxc.hu
Agrofuels are produced from large-scale industrial monoculture of frequently genetically engineered (GE) crops such as soy, palm oil, sugar cane, canola etc. In certain parts of the world there are incentives for growing biofuels, and as a consequence, rather than helping with the climate change problem, it is adding to it.
Industrial monoculture can have numerous negative impacts on the environment, climate and on humanity. These would include the depletion and erosion of soil, the contamination and overuse of waterways, the overuse of non-organic fertilisers and toxic agrichemicals and an increasing dependance on a small number of GE varieties with the loss of diverse and native agriculture.
In addition, the monocultures of soy and sugar cane in Latin America and palm oil in Indonesia and Malaysia have resulted in massive deforestation and the loss of important biodiversity.
Agrofuels are held up as an important solution to global warming, being renewable, but more accurate life-cycle assessments suggests that large scale monoculture increases greenhouse emissions via increasing deforestation and degradation of peatlands and soils. At the same time it also is creating more nitrous oxide emissions from fertiliser use. The water use by irrigating all this monocultured landscape also contributes to the problem.
Agrofuels also are a threat to food and land rights of indigenous people and the rural poor such as the Ethiopians, as they lead to their displacement (rarely peaceful), and the diversion of lands that were primarily used to produce food for local consumption into large scale monoculture for export to wealthy northern countries. Workers are subjected to poor pay and conditions, exposure to chemicals, and other abuses.
The only way to stop this travesty is for us to make drastic cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions via decreasing our current energy requirements and switching to truly sustainable sources such as wind, solar, geothermal and wave energy. Spare a thought for the Ethiopian and South American farmers who are being displaced from their lands and hired back to grow fuel for our guzzlers.
So lets not burn the world's crops in our cars, lets burn them as nourishment for our bodies, and spend all that money teaching Ethiopian and other third world farmers how to grow permacultured food. And lets face it, charity begins at home too, so support your local permaculture group and lets get back to small family farms for our own food production. See you at the markets!
Related articles:
- What we eat affects the world and its population
- Garnaut’s vision not far enough
- Hans Baer: health impacts of climate change
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