Bulletin Issue 112 - November 2006

Replacing fossil fuels by biofuels (produced from plant biomass) may seem a step along the right path to avoid worsening climate change. However plans for their production and use not only leave this problem unsolved but make many others worse. The biofuels to be adopted are biodiesel (obtained from oilseeds) and ethanol (obtained from fermentation of plant cellulose). Among the many possible crops for this purpose are soybeans, corn, colza, groundnuts, sunflower seeds, oil palms, sugarcane, poplar and eucalyptus trees.

The US Department of Energy's Office of Biological and Environmental Research (DOE) is funding a $1.4 million, three-year study by Purdue faculty members to determine ways to alter lignin and test whether the genetic changes affect the quality of plants used to produce biofuels. A hybrid poplar tree is the basis for the research that is part of the DOE's goal to replace 30 percent of the fossil fuel used annually in the United States for transportation with biofuels by 2030.

In 1972, a study conducted by the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT), on growing consumer trends alerted politicians and scientists all over the world. The research titled “The limits of growth” was prepared by an international group of scientists, researchers and industrialists – later to be know as the Club of Rome – and became a classic for the analysis of the relationship between production and environment.

The modalities of biofuel consumption and production are already causing a negative impact on food security, rural livelihoods, forests and other ecosystems, and these negative impacts are expected to accumulate rapidly. Large-scale, export-oriented production of biofuel requires large-scale monocultures of trees, sugarcane, corn, oil palm, soy and other crops. These monocultures already form the number one cause of rural depopulation and deforestation worldwide.

There are some 800 million automobiles in the world, consuming over 50 percent of the energy produced in the world, making individual vehicles the prime cause of the greenhouse effect. Although there is consensus that climate change is a fact, there is no serious intention of changing the life-style causing it and instead, technological solutions are being sought to enable the companies benefiting from this model to maintain their profits. In this context, over the past years biofuels have started to be promoted as an alternative to global warming.

In July 2006, Pulp and Paper International reported on a conference called World Bioenergy 2006. The conference took place in Sweden, where biofuels provide 25 per cent of Sweden’s energy and the majority of its heating. “Pulp mills with combined heat and power plants sending excess energy to district heating systems are an established part of the country’s infrastructure and a useful source of extra income for its pulp mills,” notes Pulp and Paper International.

In Brazil, production through agriculture of a new energy model is present every day in the mass media and increasingly the development of this field is gaining social endorsement and economic justification. Rapidly, the use of land to produce food is sharing its space with the fuel production. This change in social perception is very evident in the repeated news features showing farmers and landowners as the new “oil field” owners.

In Cameroon, like in other African countries such as Ivory Coast or Ghana, the production of oil palm is distributed in 3 sectors: an agro-industrial sector, a village sector controlled by agro-industries, and a small-scale traditional sector. Even though Indonesia and Malaysia hold a strong leadership position in the oil palm global market, the agro-industrial sector in Cameroon can rely on several advantages.

The Western world, and in particular the countries of the North, gave in to addiction to fossil fuels. This path has led to something that today nobody can doubt: climate change. Many solutions have been put forth to face it, but most of them let humanity’s race towards suicide continue as vigorously as before. Biofuel mega-projects are some of the proposals to solve the problem. However, have those who submitted them as an alternative measured the consequences their creation could have on important ecosystems, peoples and culture? In the first place, this article delimits the steps taken to open up the field to these projects, focussing in particular on the implications of planting African palms, from which one of the biofuels to be produced is derived.

Indonesia is one of the world’s most populous and rural countries, with a total population of 220 million people. The country now has some 6 million hectares of land under oil palm and has cleared three times as much, some 18 million hectares of forests, in the name of oil palm expansion. Existing regional plans have already allotted a further 20 million hectares for oil palm plantations, mainly in Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi and West Papua, and new plans are currently under discussion to establish the world’s largest palm oil plantation of 1.8 million hectares in the heart of Borneo.

Malaysia, together with Indonesia, is the world's leading producer of crude palm oil for export, at a high cost, though. According to a 2005 Friends of the Earth report, 87 per cent of recent deforestation in the country has occurred to make way for palm-oil plantations. Since Malaysian rainforests are some of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet, clearing these areas poses serious threat to countless species of plants and animals.