While the promotion of agrofuels -wrongly called biofuels- continues increasing and resulting in the establishment of more and more plantations in Southern countries to produce them, many voices of representatives from North and South denounce their impacts and intend to influence those who are taking decisions to promote them.
One of the decisions that is already causing a considerable increase in the production of agrofuels, is the one taken by the European Union which established the target that by the year 2020, 10 % of transport should be using agrofuels.
Bulletin articles
The race for agrofuels has reached Benin. With heavy support from the government and forming a key part of the “agricultural revival strategy” promoted by the IMF restructuring programme, millions of hectares of agricultural and forest land are to be turned over to agrofuel production for export, with no discussion or concern for the impacts that this will have on the Beninese, their food production and their environment.
Indigenous peoples living in the tropical rainforests of Central Africa are widely dispersed and identify their groups by a variety of names. Numbering a total of 300,000 to 500,000 people, those members of communities from several ethnic groups characterized by their small stature are identified under the generic name of “pygmies” (see WRM Bulletin Nº 119).
On 27 April 2007, following a visit to the Amazon region, the President of the Republic, Mr. Rafael Correa decreed a ban on timber extraction from this area because of the imminent disappearance of the country’s native forests. In spite of this declaration, the extraction of cedar wood in the Yasuni National Park (YNP) and in the Intangible Zone continues non-stop.
In 2002, under the Tenth Plan, the Indian government set the national goal of having 33 percent of the country’s geographic area under “green cover” by 2012. The plan was even presented as part of India’s commitment towards the Millennium Goal on environmental sustainability. However, it is much more about industrial encroachment of forest land for tree plantations.
Since the year 2000, every July 26th has become an annual global commemorative day for the mangroves. This year's theme is entitled "On Behalf of Indigenous and Traditional Communities and Food Sovereignty."
In reference to this year's campaign, the Latin American Mangrove Network, Redmanglar International states that International Mangrove Action Day “proclaims a call for the rights of the indigenous and traditional communities of the mangrove ecosystem based on the recognition of our territory where we build our culture, our identity and the base for our food sovereignty.”
The main aim of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is the conservation and sustainable use of the world’s biological diversity. It would thus seem obvious that anything that threatens biodiversity should be adequately addressed by signatories to the convention.
In May this year, a group of indigenous people who had remained in voluntary isolation established contact with the outside world. This happened in the north of the State of Para. The indigenous people walked for 5 days for over 100 kilometres through the dense Amazon forest, crossing the frontier from Mato Grosso until unexpectedly appearing in an indigenous Kayapo village.
With much song and dance, Agro-fuels have quickly found a place on the agendas of the governments of the North…and of the South. They promise energy independence, business, a solution to global warming, business, more foreign currency, business!!!
To the disappointment of some and the relief of others, tree plantation projects, particularly those involving large-scale monocultures, have been struggling to access a new subsidy offered by the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism: in the three years since the rules for afforestation and reforestation projects were adopted, and after twelve rounds of baseline methodology submissions, only one plantation, in China, has been registered as a CDM project.
Registered on last January 22, the “Project 0143 : UTE Barreiro S.A. Renewable Electricity Generation Project” of Vallourec & Mannesmann (V&M), the world's largest manufacturer of seamless hot-rolled steel tubes, is the third try of the company to get funds under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) scheme. The registered project will provide V&M with 67954 carbon credits it can sell to companies in the North who prefer buying such carbon credits to reducing emissions at home.
More and more the rush to use biomass as an alternative source of energy allegedly to reduce CO2 emissions is concealing the unsustainable consumption pattern that underlies global warming and climate change.
Reduccionist approaches focus on solutions which create even greater harm. That is the case of a major European project which has enthusiastically identified industrial-scale eucalyptus plantations as an answer for so said less polluting steel manufacturing processes.