Agrofuels in the food regime

Abstract

The biofuels rush represents the continued externalisation of capitalism's costs, through the distraction of green fuel. This essay argues that the agrarian question has been posed as a distinctive problematic across the three so-called ‘food regimes’ associated with high colonialism, developmentalism, and neoliberalism – and that the third form of the agrarian question is revealing most visibly the contradictions of the commodification of food and fuel crops. These contradictions are clearest in their developmental (and climatic) effects in biofuel expansion at the expense of human habitats and ecologies; as well as in reducing ecological processes to a price metric to facilitate carbon trading, but revealing the incommensurabilities of carbon flows and, therefore, the shortcomings of market environmentalism as a proponent of greening accumulation with biofuels.

Keywords:

• metabolic rift
• ecology
• capitalism
• farming practice
• epistemic rift
• agroecosystem
• knowledge

Notes

¹Social movement critics rename biofuels agrofuels in recognition of their problematic environmental and social consequences, whether first- or second-generation. Cf. Corporate Europe Observatory (2007).

²‘US corn ethanol explains one-third of the rise in the world corn price according to the FAO, and 70 percent according to the IMF. The World Bank estimates that the US policy is responsible for 65 percent of the surge in agricultural prices, and for … the former USDA Chief economist, it explains 60 percent of the price rise’ (Berthelot 2008, 27).

³Cf. Martinez-Alier (2002).

⁴Just as Arrighi (1994) has argued, British and American hegemonies, backed with military/financial force, were founded in political-economic principles (e.g. freedom of trade, freedom of enterprise) adopted by rival states as relatively universal organising principles, so the WTO institutionalised a universally accepted organising principle (liberalisation), with military/financial/legal force standing behind adoption by member states, despite asymmetry of observance between North and South.

⁵Note that ecological degradation characterised the imposition of tropical export agricultures by imperial powers (cf. Davis 2001).

⁶This term comes from La Vía Campesina, an international coalition of peasant organizations.

⁷Arguably, Henry Bernstein's (2008) plea to analyse the agrarian question today as a question of labour reproduces a classical, accumulation-centred episteme that is at odds with the reality of peasant political mobilisation as a new social class (class here because it is constituted as a political class via neoliberal capitalist process) – dedicated not to reproducing a traditional peasantry, but drawing on traditions (ecological knowledges, culture of the commons) of the ‘peasant way’ (as La Vía Campesina names it) to reconstitute smallholder agriculture around land rights, local markets, labour/knowledge co-operation, agro-ecological methods and ‘agrarian citizenship’ (Wittman 2009).

⁸See GRAIN (2008b). Roughly 20 percent of the global land grab is scheduled for agrofuel crops, which, alongside of projected export food crops, constitute a new investment frontier for food, financial, energy and auto companies (Vidal 2009, 12).

⁹E.g. the UK Gallagher Report (2008).

¹⁰The Bank promotes land legislation to enable land sales to foreign investors.

¹¹Rist et al. (2009) note, for example, that oil palm production contributes over 63 percent of smallholder household incomes in two locations in Sumatra, and that there is evidence of oil palm alleviating poverty.

¹²For a development of this observation, see Araghi (2010).

¹³The World Bank (2007) noted that the ‘grain required to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle with ethanol (240 kilograms of maize for 100 litres of ethanol) could feed one person for a year’ (Policy Brief: ‘Biofuels: The Promise and the Risks’).

¹⁴See for example, Foster (2000), Moore (2000), Clark and York (2005), McMichael (2008) and Wittman (2009).

¹⁵See Lohmann (2006) for an extended discussion of this.

¹⁶Analogously, agrofuels have distinct feedback effects through the mechanism of price as the value-form of capital accumulation. Thus certification schemes, focusing on ‘sustainable’ agrofuel production, are unable to address ‘leakage’ or displacement of production elsewhere. As TNI notes, ‘Future certified palm oil, for example, might be produced from land deforested several years previously, while forest continues to be cleared for palm oil for other markets’ (2007, 31, emphasis added).

¹⁷The IAASTD emphasises that reinventing ‘agriculture’ requires experts in agricultural knowledge, science and technology to work with local farmers, and other professionals such as social and health scientists, governments and civil society.

¹⁸For an extended treatment of this subject see McMichael (2009a).

¹⁹Hari (2009, 16) notes that Greenpeace investigated an initial REDD-like model in Bolivia, where The Nature Conservancy, British Petroleum, Pacificorp, and American Electric Power in 1997 established a protected forest called the Noel Kempff Climate Action Project, preserving 3.9 million acres of tropical forest (to prevent release of 55 million tons of CO²) allowing an equivalent release elsewhere from coal and oil operations. In addition, the money received for the offset was use to log a neighbouring forest.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Philip McMichael

The author thanks Kate Neville for helpful feedback on an earlier version, and two anonymous reviewers.