The first controversy to hit biofuels called into question their carbon benefits. In theory, biofuels are carbon neutral. This means that even though burning the biofuel releases carbon dioxide (CO2), the carbon will have been removed from the atmosphere and stored in the plant during its growth. However, in practice, potential carbon savings are reduced as the growth, harvesting, transport and conversion of biofuels generates greenhouse gases (GHG). A growing body of evidence has demonstrated that, in some instances, biofuels can be more carbon- intensive than their fossil fuel counterparts (see for example, Pimentel and Patzek 2005; Hill et al. 2006; Zah et al. 2007; Panichelli et al. 2008; Fargione et al. 2008; Scharlemann and Laurance
production of biofuel feedstocks on land that was previously forest, wetland, peatland or grassland has enormous consequences for the carbon balance of the biofuel. Although research has focused on the carbon implications of direct land use change, other environmental impacts of habitat loss – for example biodiversity loss, water pollution and soil degradation – can be as significant.
The second major criticism of biofuels concerned the impacts on food prices – the ‘food vs. fuel’ debate, which has called into question the ethics of diverting land from food to energy production. According to the FAO (2009), biofuels represent the largest source of new demand for agricultural commodities in recent years. First generation biofuels are produced from conventional food crops, including corn, palm oil, sugarcane and soya, which led to direct competition with food production – increasing agricultural commodity prices and affecting food security. Increased demand for biofuels was blamed for the food commodity price increases of 2007-08, which sparked riots in several countries, including Haiti, Zimbabwe and Indonesia (Dauvergne and Neville 2010; FAO 2013a). The actual contribution that biofuels made to the food price hikes has been debated (e.g. FAO 2008; Zilberman et al. 2012), but most assessments concluded biofuels played an important role. Regardless of the actual proportion, the diversion of crops from food to fuels has affected food security, in particular for poor rural smallholders and urban dwellers, since both groups are net purchasers of food (FAO 2008; Ewing and Msangi 2009).
In the same year, awareness of the indirect impacts of biofuels was raised by the publication of Tim Searchinger’s paper in Science (Searchinger et al. 2008; see also Fargione et al. 2008). ILUC occurs when biofuel production displaces existing agricultural activity onto to another area of land resulting in the conversion of an area that was not previously under agricultural production. This conversion may take place in the same country where the feedstock is produced or may be displaced to a different country. Just as with direct land use change, the carbon debt may take decades or centuries to recoup. Bertzky et al. (2011) caution that ILUC is effectively invisible, rendering it extremely difficult to identify, document and monitor. Various models have been developed to quantify the ILUC impacts of biofuel production (e.g. Searchinger et al. 2008; Al Riffai et al. 2010; Laborde 2011), yet significant uncertainties and varying assumptions make the outcomes ambiguous (Palmer 2011; Di Lucia et al. 2012). This renders determining the actual (indirect) impacts of specific biofuel targets difficult and presents a challenge for policymakers who must regulate drawing on inconclusive evidence on the scale and severity of ILUC (Di Lucia et al. 2012). Governance responses to ILUC
will be discussed in Chapter Four, but it is important to mention here that attempts to establish a consensus on addressing the issue have so far proved unsuccessful.
The most recent biofuels controversy has focused on large-scale land acquisitions or ‘land grabs’, which have increased rapidly since the 2007-08 food price hikes. Although land acquisitions have occurred throughout history, the speed and scale at which the current land rush is taking place has caused concern, particularly amongst NGOs and development academics. There is no single definition of a ‘land grab’; land may be sold outright, acquired through long-term leases or obtained through outgrowing schemes (FOE 2010). Land deals are difficult to document and as a result estimates of the scale of the phenomenon vary. Between 2000 and 2010, the Land Matrix (2012) documented land deals that amounted to 83 million hectares (Mha), equivalent to 1.7% of the world’s agricultural area. Alternative figures are provided by Oxfam (2011) who claim 227 Mha has changed hands over the same period, while the World Bank (2010) identified 464 projects between 2008 and 2009 covering 57 Mha. What is certain is that this new wave of land acquisitions involves deals that are large-scale; in 2010, the median size of land acquisitions was 40,000 ha, while a quarter of all deals involved areas greater than 200,000 ha (Schiedel and Sorman 2012). Despite a focus on international actors, national actors (including both governments and companies) are also playing a major role in land acquisitions. The (macro) economic opportunities for countries involved in land acquisitions rarely extend to local communities where poor governance and weak enforcement of customary land rights has caused rapid and widespread changes in land use patterns and ownership. Although critics have been quick to blame biofuels (e.g. FOE 2010; ActionAid 2011; Oxfam 2012) and transnational actors (e.g. Carrington 2011; Der Spiegel 2013; Global Witness 2013), research reveals a more complex picture that involves multiple drivers, actors and pressures on land (Anseeuw et al. 2012; Fairhead et al. 2013). As the global population increases and consumption patterns change these pressures on land are unlikely to diminish.
These debates have not only undermined the ecological rationale for biofuels, but have also drawn attention to their social consequences, particularly for producer countries in the global South. They have raised the possibility that political imperatives have dominated over the scientific and social scientific evidence and have highlighted the importance of understanding the social, political, economic and ecological contexts within which biofuels are produced and promoted. These debates also raise the question of whether these issues were foreseeable and therefore preventable. Taking the food versus fuel debate as an example, in 2007 – even before the food price hikes – Swenson observed that large changes in one segment
of a commodity production system would have consequences for other aspects of agriculture, as well as for other industries and consumers (Swenson 2007). Given that explicit aims of the agricultural development objective were to prop up food prices and create new markets for agricultural products, conflict with food prices was arguably inevitable. However, in Europe and the U.S., it was envisioned that biofuels would be produced by domestic farmers for domestic markets. The involvement of exporter countries, in the EU at least, was not mentioned until relatively late in the policy development process and even then only in terms of the trade benefits (EC 2001a; see also Chapter Four). Early biofuels policy was centred on creating demand in the industrialised countries and little consideration was given to the potential consequences beyond national borders. Stirling (2006, 2007, 2009) has repeatedly argued for the ‘opening up’ of the social appraisal of technologies in order to develop more robust understandings of technical and environmental complexities. Opening up technology appraisals would include:
‘aspects of the social and organisational – as well as physical and biological - context and, in particular, the effects of the exercise [i.e. appraisal] of political, economic and institutional power’ (Stirling 2009: 206).
Early appraisals of biofuels were narrowly framed to focus on the technical, economic and climate outcomes, particularly for OECD countries. A more precautionary approach – one that provided for independence from sectional interests, an examination of uncertainties, and the integration of different knowledges and divergent social values – could arguably have revealed future tensions and implications of biofuels policy (Stirling 2007, 2009; Palmer 2012). In addition, greater participation, particularly from stakeholders in the global South, might have opened up the debate to different framing conditions and assumptions (Brown 2009; Stirling 2009). Biofuels pose difficult, if not insuperable, challenges including the need to quantify, ex- ante, indirect effects that spread across regions and countries in ways that are difficult to isolate with much accuracy (Upham et al. 2013). However, the narrow framing of biofuels as a win-win, ecologically modern solution to decarbonising the transport sector failed to recognise and develop ways of dealing with the risks. Even though evidence of the negative impacts of biofuels continues to emerge, governments have remained steadfast in their provision of political and financial support for biofuels.
This section has discussed the growing controversies over biofuels; however, these arguments are typically high-level, obscuring the differentiated impacts between and within countries. These impacts will be shaped by power and scale, issues which political ecological
studies seek to make explicit. Before I return to the evidence of the local level outcomes of biofuels, the next section discusses the complexities associated with investigating and assigning causality to biofuels.