The Politics of Biofuels, Land and Agrarian Change

Saturnino Borras Jr., Philip McMichael, Ian Scoones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317985402
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

This book addresses key questions on biofuels within agrarian political economy, political sociology and political ecology. Contributions are based on fresh empirical materials from different parts of the world. The book starts with four key questions in agrarian political economy: Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what? And what do they do with the surplus wealth? It also addresses the emergent social and political relations in the biofuel complex and, given the impacts on natural resources and sustainability, engages with questions about people-environment interactions. At the same time, the book is concerned with the politics of representation, that is, what are the discursive frames through which biofuels are promoted and/or opposed?

The book analyses the institutional structures, and cultures of energy consumption on which a biofuels complex depends, and the alternative political and ecological visions emerging that call the biofuels complex into question. Across sixteen chapters presenting material from five regions across the North-South divide and focusing on fourteen countries including Brazil, Indonesia, India, USA and Germany, these topics are addressed within the following themes: global (re)configurations; agro-ecological visions; conflicts, resistances and diverse outcomes; state, capital and society relations; mobilising opposition, creating alternatives; and change and continuity.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

The politics of biofuels, land and agrarian change: editors' introduction

Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Philip McMichael and Ian Scoones

This introduction frames key questions on biofuels, land and agrarian change within agrarian political economy, political sociology and political ecology. It identifies and explains big questions that provide the starting point for the contributions to this collection. We lay out some of the emerging themes which define the politics of biofuels, land and agrarian change revolving around global (re)configurations; agro-ecological visions; conflicts, resistances and diverse outcomes; state, capital and society relations; mobilising opposition, creating alternatives; and change and continuity. An engaged agrarian political economy combined with global political economy, international relations and social movement theory provides an important framework for analysis and critique of the conditions, dynamics, contradictions, impacts and possibilities of the emerging global biofuels complex. Our hope is that this collection demonstrates the significance of a political economy of biofuels in capturing the complexity of the ‘biofuels revolution’ and at the same time opening up questions about its sustainability in social and environmental terms that provide pathways towards alternatives.

Questions of agrarian political economy

In this collection we ask a number of questions emerging out of the new agrarian political economy created by the ‘biofuel complex’. Together the papers offer perspectives from political economy, political sociology and political ecology, and provide a framework for understanding new agrarian relations in the biofuel era.

Our starting point, following Bernstein (2010a), has been four key questions in agrarian political economy: Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what? And what do they do with the surplus wealth? As White and Dasgupta (2010) explain, we are also interested in the emergent social and political relations in the biofuel complex, asking, how do people interact with each other? And, given the impacts on natural resources and sustainability, we are also interested in questions about people-environment interactions, asking for example, how are changes in politics shaped by dynamic ecologies, and vice versa? (See also Bernstein 2010b). At the same time, we are concerned with the politics of representation, that is, what are the discursive frames through which biofuels are promoted and/or opposed? And what are the institutional structures, and cultures of energy consumption on which a biofuels complex depends, and what alternative political and ecological visions are emerging to call the biofuels complex into question? Through a range of cases, which we will introduce briefly below, the aim is to ask a range of big-picture questions in a number of sites globally, focusing all the time on the political economy of the biofuel complex.

While there has been much written on the expansion of biofuels and associated ‘land grabs’ across the world (e.g. GRAIN 2008, Monsalve et al. 2008, Oxfam 2008, Cotula et al. 2009, von Braun and Meinzen-Dick 2009), there has been much less analysis of the underlying political-economic-ecological dynamics. This collection therefore starts with a set of questions which have helped frame the papers:

• Is the new rush to allocate land for biofuels fundamentally changing agrarian structures? What are the echoes of past colonial interventions in plantation agriculture?
• Who is driving these new biofuel investments? Where are the centres of power? What are the politics of the underlying policy processes?
• How do social-economic-political dynamics intersect with ecological dynamics? Is there a particular political ecology of biofuels?
• What are the impacts of new biofuel investments?Who wins, who loses – and what are the consequences for rural livelihoods? What new agrarian relations – dissected by class, gender, ethnicity or race – are emerging?
• What forms of resistance exist? What are the issues that unite and divide key actors around biofuels? Are there alternative biofuel development trajectories that support livelihoods, protect the environment and are rooted in principles of social justice?

In different ways, these questions provide the starting point for the papers that follow in this collection. In the following sections, we lay out some of the emerging themes which define the politics of biofuels, land and agrarian change.

The emerging biofuels complex

The recent expansion of industrial biofuels expresses several trends in global political economy. These include the global commodification of a time-honoured local energy supplement and the consolidation of corporate power in the energy and agribusiness sectors. The biofuels revolution responds to an assumed ‘energy crisis’, as the cost of capital inputs (production, processing, transport) rises in an age of peaking oil supplies. In addition, a desire to reduce dependence on Middle Eastern oil drives governments to develop an industrial biofuels complex which delivers ‘energy security’. At the same time, biofuels represent a new profitability frontier for agribusiness and energy sectors beset with declining productivity and/or rising costs (Magdoff 2008, McMichael 2009, Houtart 2010, McMichael 2010). Biofuels are also presented as a route to reducing or transforming energy-use patterns in ways that can ameliorate environmental concerns without affecting economic growth. This ‘win-win’ narrative is reflected in diverse policy debates in Europe (Franco et al. 2010) and in the United States (Hollander 2010 and Gillon 2010), and has dominated the framing of the biofuels debate globally.

Thus, when the Bush administration set corn ethanol targets (35 billion gallons by 2017) with huge subsidies to the agribusiness giants ADM, Bunge, Cargill and others in 2007, the European Union matched this with a 10 percent target for a biofuels mix in transport fuels by 2020. Following this example, the UK's Gallagher Report (Gallagher 2008) estimated, via a mid-range scenario of land use, that by 2020 about 500 million more hectares of land, one-third more than currently under cultivation, would be required to meet global demand for biofuels. Estimates suggest that Northern fuel needs could be met now with the conversion of 70 percent of European farmland to fuel crops, and the entire US corn and soy harvest (Holt-Giménez 2007). However, given (subsidised) biofuel targets and enabling Kyoto protocols, corporations and financiers are investing massively in biofuel production in the global South. It is these combined processes that are creating an emergent global biofuel complex.

Some estimates show that European firms already claim over five million hectares of land for biofuel development across the global South. At present Brazil plans to replace 10 percent of the world's fossil fuels by 2025 with sugar ethanol, Malaysia and Indonesia are expanding oil palm plantations to supply 20 percent of EU biodiesel needs, India plans 14m hectares of land for Jatropha plantations, and Africa 400m (Holt-Giménez 2007, Vidal 2007, 3, Altieri 2009). With this, some argue, food production will be undermined and the shift to biofuels will aggravate land availability for rural livelihoods (Weis 2010).

The lure of biofuels can also potentially accelerate deforestation trends – for example, 80 percent of the Indonesian rainforest (covering 77 percent of Indonesia in the mid-1960s) has already disappeared (Gouverneur 2009, 5), largely due to timber exploration and massive expansion of palm oil. Dispossessed indigenous peoples in the Amazon refer to biofuel plantations as the ‘devil's orchards’, which accelerate displacement trends with oil-palm and sugarcane plantations that, some estimates show, generate one-tenth the number of jobs generated by family farming per 100 hectares (Holt-Giménez 2007), and by displacing food crops with fuel crops.

Meanwhile, where normative and/or legitimacy concerns, combined with the global financial crisis, may have slowed the ‘biofuel revolution’, initiatives to develop a global complex continue. Ethanol superpower Brazil leads the way, ‘helped in this strategy by the trans-nationalisation of its leading firms, by the initiatives of its national development bank, BNDES, which increasingly operates outside Brazil, and by its leadership position in tropical agriculture research and extension’ (Wilkinson 2009, 103; also Wilkinson and Herrera 2010).

A global biofuel complex is still incipient, as neo-mercantilist practices (protected subsidised national biofuel sectors, with offshore complements managed through tariff structures) continue alongside emergent globalising recombinant corporate/state arrangements (Neville and Dauvergne 2010). New oil, auto, food, and biotech industrial alliances, investing in Southern land and processing infrastructures, and the development of an international marketing infrastructure complement new private-public partnerships. One such new alliance, between Cargill and Monsanto, incorporated as Renessen, seeks to integrate animal feed and agro-fuels, where genetically modified maize, soy and rapeseed produced for feed can produce biofuels from the same biomass. Here animal feed becomes a by-product of biofuel production, making it ‘still more difficult for countries to extricate themselves from industrial farming’ (TNI 2007, 11). In the palm-oil complex, for example, the Indonesian palm oil trade is dominated by a combination of Cargill (the world's largest private company), an ADM-Kuck-Wilmar alliance (the world's largest biofuels manufacturer), and Synergy Drive, and the Malaysian government firm ‘soon to become the world's biggest palm oil conglomerate’ (Greenpeace 2007, 3). In parallel there is the ‘ethanol alliance’ (US, Brazil, the Central American corridor, together with multinational companies); Brazil's ethanol alliances with India, China, Mozambique and South Africa; and the Southern Cone transgenic soy complex (Argentina, and Paraguay, with Bunge, and Dreyfus), linked to EU preferences. More recently, Royal Dutch Shell is exploring a joint venture with Brazil's most powerful bioethanol producer, Cosan. For Shell, this move arrests a profitability slide by signalling growth potential to investors, for Cosan this alliance would double ethanol production, and for Brazil it would consolidate its role as ‘the world's alternative energy superpower with the potential to ship huge quantities of fuel to the US and Europe’, assuming a US reduction in biofuel import tariffs (Mathiason 2010, 43).

The emerging biofuels complex thus reproduces a ‘global ecology’ (Sachs 1993), whereby planetary resources are to be managed through the application of the market paradigm to the environment (‘market environmentalism’), reinforcing a growing ‘metabolic rift’, and the separation of people and nature (McMichael 2010). The consequences are the deepening of a North/South asymmetry (via the ‘ecological footprint’), and the privileging of corporate management of energy resources: converting biofuels into an industrial commodity at the expense of encouraging local biofuel developments for local ‘energy sovereignty’, in accordance with the requirements of food sovereignty (Rosset 2009) and the reproduction of biodiversity (see, for example, related discussion by Fernandes et al. 2010).

Characterised as part of an ‘energy transition’, many believe corporate-driven and controlled biofuels represent short-term responses sustaining an unsustainable model of agro-industrialisation, and energy consumption, in the name of arresting climate change through market environmentalism. Substituting an alternative energy commodity to address greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the market paradigm thus ‘externalises’ the profound social and environmental contradictions stemming from an industrial biofuel complex. By constructing the biofuel complex in this way, alternative food-energy pathways are excluded, and more sustainable and equitable uses of biofuels in agri-food-energy systems are, as a consequence, ignored.

In the papers in this collection, the contours of the emerging biofuel complex are interrogated. There are clear winners and losers, but the story is not one of simple black and white. The political configurations that construct the biofuel complex and frame the narratives that justify investment in it must be understood if we are to unravel its causes and consequences.

Global (re-)configurations

All contributions in this collection are, at root, concerned with locating the expansion of biofuels in understandings of globalisation processes. As already discussed, in some parts of the world, a new corporate-driven biofuel politics is emerging, but it is one with multiple axes and influences, and simplistic analyses of the political dynamics of the biofuel complex are insufficient. Dauvergne and Neville, for example, highlight how capitalist relations between North and South, rooted in long-term colonial and trading relationships, are being supplanted by new configurations, including linkages between countries in the global South, with Brazil and Indonesia being major players. There are, they suggest, also triangular North-South-South formations, where transnational capital based in the North allies with South-South collaborations. Wilkinson and Herrera (2010), for example, document the extraordinary array of investors in Brazil's bio-ethanol industry which, prior to the 2008–09 financial crisis and global economic slow-down, looked set to take off in a massive way. Equally, Richardson (2010) notes the importance of Brazilian alongside South African investors in the expansion of sugar cane in southern Africa. As McMichael (2010, 611) observes, these new dimensions of globalisation create new agri-food-fuel regimes, constructing in turn new ‘projects of rule’, whereby the corporate food-fuel regime creates, to paraphrase Harvey (2003), ‘a politics of accumulation by dispossession’.

How do we understand these new relationships, constructed in new ways with new players? Conventional axes of power of course still operate, but there are important new dimensions. Across the papers different words are used to describe these formations: alliances, chains, networks and assemblages. Although all have different connotations and implications, drawing from different literatures (e.g. Sassen 2006, Mol 2007), the general sense is the same: biofuels as a commodity are constructed through social, political and economic relations in ways that must be understood as a whole, and located within wider, often global, processes.

Following Ong and Collier (2005), Hollander (2010), for example, identifies a biofuel assemblage centred on Miami, Florida, but with hemispheric reach. The assemblage connotes ‘the proliferation of technologies across the world produces systems that mix technology, politics, and actors in diverse configurations that do not follow given scales or political mappings’ (Ong and Collier 2005, 338). They are, as a result, situated, unstable and contingent. As Hollander shows, Miami, as a ‘global city’ (Sassen 2006), is the centre of sugar politics in the US, ‘serving as a gateway to information, investment, and commodities’. Three interlocking organisations are analysed: the Inter-American Ethanol Commission (now the International Biofuels Commission); the Florida FTAA, Inc. (now Gateway Florida, Inc.); and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, demonstrating the power and reach of the assemblage. What we are seeing, Hollander argues, is ‘a global biofuels assemblage that links public entities at a variety of scales – supranational, national, and sub-national (the state of Florida is a case in point) – with universities, international institutions and private transnational corporations, including agribusiness, energy, automotive and biotechnology companies. The political leadership promoting the assemblage is emanating from multiple sources, incl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Critical Agrarian Studies
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1. The politics of biofuels, land and agrarian change: editors' introduction
• 2. Agrofuels capitalism: a view from political economy
• 3. Agrofuels in the food regime
• 4. Forests, food, and fuel in the tropics: the uneven social and ecological consequences of the emerging political economy of biofuels
• 5. Assumptions in the European Union biofuels policy: frictions with experiences in Germany, Brazil and Mozambique
• 6. Power is sweet: sugarcane in the global ethanol assemblage
• 7. Fields of dreams: negotiating an ethanol agenda in the Midwest United States
• 8. Biofuels in Brazil: debates and impacts
• 9. Biofuel, dairy production and beef in Brazil: competing claims on land use in São Paulo state
• 10. Agrofuel policies in Brazil: paradigmatic and territorial disputes
• 11. Processes of inclusion and adverse incorporation: oil palm and agrarian change in Sumatra, Indonesia
• 12. The biofuel connection – transnational activism and the palm oil boom
• 13. The political ecology of Jatropha plantations for biodiesel in Tamil Nadu, India
• 14. Over the heads of local people: consultation, consent, and recompense in large-scale land deals for biofuels projects in Africa
• 15. Big Sugar in southern Africa: rural development and the perverted potential of sugar/ethanol exports
• 16. The politics of Jatropha-based biofuels in Kenya: convergence and divergence among NGOs, donors, government officials and farmers
• Index