The New Biofuel Republics

Here at the BioPact, we strive towards establishing a common bioenergy and biofuels future between Europe and Africa which will lift millions of Africans out of poverty. We understand that such a relationship will be extremely complex and politically sensitive, due to Europe's past in Africa.
One of the critics of the BioPact is the Institute of Science in Society, which published an interesting overview of some of the issues involved, opening with the following message:

Poor developing nations are to feed the voracious appetites of rich countries for biofuels instead of their own hungry masses, and suffer the devastation of their natural forests and biodiversity

We have to stress that ISIS makes many common mistakes (e.g. food versus energy farming, whereas in reality both boost each other), does not really understand the proposed relationship and takes a very one-sided view, refusing to see the many benefits that might come from a shared bioenergy future. We do agree with some of their points, though, since the BioPact wants a socially responsible relationship, and not one merely based on a predatory capitalist trade logic.

Let us discuss the points made by ISIS, one for one.


ISIS: Poor developing nations are to feed the voracious appetites of rich countries for biofuels instead of their own hungry masses, and suffer the devastation of their natural forests and biodiversity.

BioPact: On the contrary, developing countries have weak agricultural expertise and can benefit by being helped to grow bioenergy crops. As the Brazilian example shows, outreach, knowledge and tech transfers focusing on bioenergy have a synergetic and spillover effect on overal agricultural productivity. In other words: if we help poor farmers to grow bioenergy crops professionally, they will be able to increase their food production at the same time.
Moreover, energy farming makes it possible for poor farmers to diversify their crop portfolio. In the past, millions of farmers who were dependent on one single cash-crop have been pushed into poverty because world prices for their crop crashed. When they now farm for food and for energy, they can spread the risk. This brings more income security to them, for the first time.
Finally, many poor farmers' current techniques rely on primitive slash-and-burn farming or on extensive agriculture, which is extremely damaging to the environment. It is absolutely crucial to reach them and introduce new intensive techniques (using [bio]-fertilizers and [bio]pesticides), good management, meteorological information, and working marketing tools and infrastructure. The bioenergy opportunity will bring these instruments for the first time. The effect is less environmentally destructive farming in the developing world.
Added to this is the well-known problem of poverty-related agricultural traps: a poor farmer has no money to buy fertilizer and pesticides, so he uses extensive agriculture which destroys forests and ecosystems. The biofuels opportunity will increase farming incomes, which breaks this trap.
Both his food security and his income will increase.

The only realistic way to bring these techniques and tools to the poor farmers, is via the biofuels opportunity.

ISIS: The industrialised countries are looking to the Third World to feed their addiction: the land is there for the taking as is cheap labour

BioPact: there is indeed plenty of land that is not being used. Take the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country the size of Western Europe. It currently uses less than 5% of its arable land. 40% of the country consists of forest areas, which leaves 55% of unused, non-forest land. Millions and millions of hectares. Many countries in Africa have similar low land use rates.
Why would anyone want to object against using non-forest land to grow energy?
About the "cheap" labor. Consider the following: a Congolese farmer, on average, currently makes US$70 per year from the 20 are he owns. If he were to grow biofuel crops on new land, his income could quintuple (some projections go so far as to see a tenfold increase).
Now ISIS may think that increasing the incomes of the poorest people on the planet tenfold, is a bad thing. We at the BioPact gladly disagree.
These farmers are farmers - it's what they do. Today, they work very hard to produce enough food to survive. We can help them to produce more food than they need, while at the same time selling green energy on an international market where energy prices keep rising. Moreover, the biofuels and bioenergy industry promises to bring in many additional, non-farming jobs (in transport, infrastructure, trade, R&D, services, fertilizer and pesticide commerce, etc...). The FAO has calculated that for each set of 10 hectares of bioenergy crops, 10 additional jobs might be created that way.
The need for formal jobs in the developing world is very high. We don't understand why ISIS objects to an opportunity to fulfill that pressing need.

ISIS: large plantations damage the environment

BioPact: this is obviously a much too general statement. Which kind of plantations? In the case of palm oil, it may be true. But in the case of sugar cane, which does not grow in rainforest areas, it is false.
Let's stick to the Congo, a future bioenergy superpower. In Congo, millions of farmers grow cassava for food. Now cassava explicitly does not grow in forest areas. Explicitly so. Just like Sorghum (which is grown in the Central African Republic or Southern Sudan, and many other countries in the Sahel). Both are excellent biofuels crops.



The BioPact would appreciate it if "think tanks" like the ISIS were more nuanced and stopped the propaganda about "all plantations being disasters" to the environment.
In fact, a crop like Jatropha curcas, is good for the environment: it combats desertification, it combats erosion (a huge problem in many developing countries) and it prevents pests from invading food growing areas.
ISIS repeats a piece of propaganda that many environmentalists throw out. For the sake of the sincerity of the debate, we demand more nuance.

ISIS: Biodiesel has also provided a much-needed outlet for the glut of genetically modified (GM) crops that consumers are rejecting worldwide. President Lula of Brazil has declared that GM soya is to be used for biofuels and “good soya” for human consumption. Argentina also has plans to transform GM soya into biodiesel.

BioPact: we do not support the use of GM biofuel crops. Because we know that they are not needed to make the difference for African farmers (with whom we are concerned). We fully support those who want more research into the long-term effects of GM crops on the environment and on the economics of dependency (many farmers become dependent on multinational GM companies).
For African farmers, opening the wealthy U.S. and E.U. markets to their biofuels would do much more to increase their incomes than a mere reliance on GM-crops, the economic benefits of which are often exaggerated.

ISIS: The biodiesel industry says that for processing biofuels, large refining plants have to be constructed close to agricultural areas or forests, where the raw material is grown. The biodiesel will then have to be transported to filling stations in the same way as oil. The oil industry will want to maintain control over the distribution of fuels, and will enter into an agreement with these new companies, as in many cases the supply chain can be very complex.

BioPact: This is a fair point, but there is a big difference between bioenergy farming and pumping up oil from a well. In the latter case, one (oil and gas) company can produce huge amounts of energy, whereas this is less likely in the context of farming. The bioenergy industry in the developing world will consist of millions of individual farmers producing biofuels and biomass. This is already the case in e.g. Malaysia's or Nigeria's palm oil industry, where more than 50% of the producers are still small-holders.
The oil industry might want to build biofuel-pipelines (as is the case in Brazil), create transmix agreements, and invest in processing centres and distribution infrastructure, but the "raw energy", the biomass, will come from many small to medium producers.

ISIS: It is said that during the growth of the crop, the plants absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. This is true of what was growing before the plantation was established. As the industry has plans of expanding exponentially, it is likely that they will begin to occupy primary or secondary forested areas, as has already happened with the soya plantations. Soya plantations have displaced the forests of el Chaco in Argentina and the forests in Pantanal, Atlantic and Chaco areas in Paraguay. Even more dramatically the Amazon, Pantanal, and Atlantic forests in Brazil have all been cut down for soya. The net CO2 balance is therefore strongly negative.

BioPact: this is scientifically incorrect. In many cases the primary biomass stores less CO2 than the bioenergy crops that replace it (in the case where grasslands are converted to bioenergy forests, for example, or in the case where one grass species is replaced by one which cycles in more CO2, as is the case with sugar cane).
Moreover, due to its low yield soya is not very useful as a biofuel crop, so we would want ISIS to stop skewing the debate (by mixing up arguments about different crops), and look at each crop individually.
Moreover, we repeat that many excellent bioenergy crops (cassava, sorghum, sugar cane), explicitly do not grow in forest areas.

ISIS: Additionally, other greenhouse gases are generated as a product of the crop itself, the processing, refining, transport and distribution of the fuel. It looks increasingly likely that biofuels is a net contributor of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

BioPact: this is a false argument, which has been disproved many times. ISIS points at the concept of "Energy return on energy invested" ("EROEI"). For bad biofuel crops like corn and soy, this energy balance is indeed negative or marginally positive.
But for real biofuel crops, like sugar cane, it is entirely positive (8 to 1); for cassava it is 7 to 1, for sorghum it is 5 to 1; for palm oil it is 8 to 1, for jatropha it is 3 to 1.

Moreover the entire biofuel production chain can be powered by... biofuels itself. Many farmers are already running their tractors and harvestors on biodiesel today. And the processing of sugar cane in Brazil is powered by sugar cane residues. In fact, so much energy is produced that Brazilian mills feed green electricity to the national grid.

The argument that the transport and processing of biofuels require petroleum, is untenable. It is possible to green the entire chain and use biofuels in each step.

When it comes to the "EROEI" of biofuels, we urge ISIS to study the science, and to stop referring to crops that should not be used as biofuel crops (such as corn and soya).

ISIS: As regards the benefits to the producers of the biofuel crops, these can be extremely negative. First, the destruction of forest and other original vegetation has already happened; and if these crops were to expand as intended, they could threaten food security and food sovereignty of the local populations, because farmers would stop producing food crops for the population and instead concentrate on producing “clean fuels” for Europe.

BioPact: this is an old and false dichotomisation. It is not food versus energy, it is energy farming boosts food farming.
We refer to the Policy Debate on Biofuels *.pdf], published by the Swedish Institute for the Environment, and by the EU's Partners4Africa, the organisation that researches bioenergy and poverty eradication in the developing world. This report - based on thorough research and experience in the field - once and for all dismisses the common myths and misunderstandings about the "food versus fuel" issue, which ISIS replicates.

Suffice to show one case, that of Malawian energy farmers: they used to grow tobacco as a cash-crop, but tobacco prices plummeted a few years ago, ruining them entirely; they now grow Jatropha, which is good for the environment, and which strengthens their income (especially now that oil prices have risen so sharply), meaning they can produce more food. Malawian energy farmers now enjoy more food security than ever before, due to their bioenergy crop production.

It is sad to see a "think tank" like ISIS, which claims to be analysing issues in depth, repeating old arguments that are not based on realities on the ground. ISIS perpetuates myths.

Bioenergy production means a boost to food production.

ISIS: Large-scale agriculture, such as is needed to comply with the demand for biofuels is highly dependent on oil derivatives such as fertilisers and pesticides, which, apart from producing CO2 emissions, are highly polluting.

BioPact: the fertilizer and pesticide argument is false, and again, a myth used by many uninformed environmentalists, Peak Oil people and others. In fact it is called the "oil-based fertilizer meme" - which is brilliantly debunked here. (Look at how the myth perpetuates itself and is repeated over and over again by non-experts and amateurs).

To put it in simple terms: fertilizers are not based on crude oil. They are based on natural gas, coal, mineral rocks and even water.

Moreover, all natural gas based fertilizers can be made from biogas. Green fertilizer. Just like there are already biopesticides for almost all known categories of pesticides.

Again, it is disappointing to see that ISIS is so badly informed, and even replicates an unscientific, false meme that was created by uninformed amateurs in the blogosphere.

We must be short: we advise the "Institute for Science in Society" (which does not have many scientists on its staff), to study the issues surrounding the production of biofuels in the South, more in depth.

ISIS adds nothing to the debate, it merely repeats scientifically unsound myths. What we need is a more holistic, scientific and realistic assessment of the costs, the opportunities and the benefits of bioenergy production in the developing world.