Fields of dreams: negotiating an ethanol agenda in the Midwest United States

Abstract

Corn ethanol production is central in the United States' agrofuels initiatives. In this paper I discuss corn ethanol production in Iowa, USA and examine several dynamics: farmers' positions in agrofuel supply chains; struggles around the construction and operation of agrofuel refineries; the politics of ethanol production and regulation; and the ecological consequences of increased corn production. I argue that current US agrofuels production and politics reinforce longstanding and unequal political economic relationships in industrial agriculture. I also argue that the politics of US agrofuels, focused on carbon accounting for greenhouse gas reduction and energy security, privilege urban and other actors' social and ecological interests over those of rural places of production.

Keywords:

• agrofuels
• biofuels
• corn
• ethanol
• agriculture
• Iowa
• environmental governance

Notes

¹The term ‘agrofuels’ is used to indicate that the production of fuel from biomass is often spatially and socioecologically placed in agricultural production systems. When referring to policy, I adopt the language of policy and use ‘biofuels’. McMichael (2009a, 283) notes that the term biofuels is problematic when used ‘as if such fuels represented life, as opposed to competition for scarce crop land, de-forestation, and so on’.

²For example, oil giant BP made a $500 million research investment in the Universities of California, Berkeley and Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. ExxonMobil granted Stanford $100 million and other oil corporations have followed suit. Valero Energy Corporation, the largest US gasoline refiner, purchased several independent ethanol plants devalued during the 2008 financial crisis.

³See Hollander (2010) on the dynamics of sugarcane ethanol in US agrofuel production, trade, and use.

⁴By ‘environmental governance’ I mean the formal and informal institutional arrangements that influence resource use and allocation, as well as mediate nature-society relations more broadly (see Lemos and Agrawal 2006 for a review).

⁵US state-led biofuel production relies on policy tools that include massive subsidies for both corn and biofuel production, tariffs levied on biofuel imports, and federally mandated production levels. These attributes apparently move US biofuel production away from neoliberal policy approaches, generally defined by government retrenchment, privatisation, devolution of responsibility, or deregulation (see Peck and Tickell 2002). Nonetheless, beyond any neoliberal moment or particular definitions of what constitutes market-based governance, agrofuels production builds on capitalist socioecological relations.

⁶See Huber (2009) on the value relations involved in and centrality of gasoline consumption in American culture and capitalist accumulation.

⁷A recent policy report points out that this substitution of ethanol for gasoline is very expensive. Citing US Government Accountability Office data they peg costs at $4 billion in subsidies to replace about two percent of the US gasoline supply or $1.95 per gallon above gasoline retail prices (Baker Institute 2010). Put alongside research demonstrating that agrofuels do not reduce GHGs (e.g. Searchinger et al. 2008), this high cost reveals US interests in maintaining secure sources of energy and accumulation in agro-industrial sectors.

⁸Public officials interviewed include several county-level conservationists working with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), the state conservationist for the NRCS, over 30 District (county level) Conservation Commissioners, the director of Iowa's Department of Natural Resources, and the director of Iowa's Office of Energy Independence. To protect interviewee anonymity I omit names and reference interview data as ‘Personal Communications'. Interview locations and dates are listed.

⁹Monsanto now offers a ‘Processor Preferred’ corn seed line bred for higher starch content to increase the efficiency of its conversion to ethanol.

¹⁰Even though considered a ‘propertied class’ in agrarian political economy, US farmers are subject to marginalisation in a competitive, capitalist agriculture (Davis 1980). Scholars in agrarian political economy have described the risks that farmers confront when facing the vagaries of commodity markets, land values, and loan rates: farmers, hoping to reap profits from high crop prices often take out loans to plant more acres or invest in new storage or planting and harvesting capacity. They hope their investment will bring a rate of return sufficient to cover the cost of the loan and that commodity markets will stay strong enough to allow loan repayment before increased productivity or more generalised price declines drive down crop commodity prices. If falling prices and land values make it impossible for farmers to repay loans, they default and face foreclosure (cf. Buttel 1989).

¹¹In another example, the RFA argued the following to California's Air Resources Board when it similarly moved to exclude corn ethanol from state-level biofuel production targets based on its indirect land use change implications: ‘The current scientific and economic understanding of indirect land use change is significantly limited and the existing body of research on the subject is largely biased by ideology and lacks supportive empirical data. We believe the burden of proof is on those who suggest expanded biofuels production in the US will cause indirect land use change. So far, there has been no defensible, indisputable proof linking biofuels to indirect land use change’ (Cooper 2009). To date, it seems that Midwestern corn ethanol will not qualify for California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard.

¹²More specifically, CRP land management increases soil nutrient and moisture retention (Davie and Lant 1994, Randall et al. 1997, Karlen et al. 1999, Baer et al. 2000, Huang et al. 2002). The CRP also provides suitable habitat in areas where little or none is present (Johnson and Schwartz 1993, Best et al. 1997, Coppedge et al. 2001); even isolated conservation lands help improve regional biodiversity by reducing landscape fragmentation in relatively simple landscapes (Dunn et al. 1993), which has relatively large effects for total landscape biodiversity and benefits agriculture by increasing pests' natural enemy populations (Tscharntke et al. 2005).

¹³See McConnell (1953) for a discussion of how democratic, bottom-up, farmer led initiatives like the SCS and its allied agencies were targeted for marginalisation or elimination by agricultural groups that historically have supported intensive agricultural production, such as the Farm Bureau.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sean Gillon

I thank Margaret FitzSimmons, Jeffery Bury, and the Political Ecology Working Group at UCSC for their guidance and comments on this work. My research is supported by the National Science Foundation (Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, Geography and Regional Sciences Directorate, Award No. BCS-0903075). Comments received from three anonymous reviewers and at the Journal of Peasant Studies and Initiatives in Critical Agrarian Studies (ICAS) workshop on Biofuels, Land and Agrarian Change in October 2009 are also greatly appreciated.