NOTE: Several links embedded in the original. More on Action Aid's anti-biofuel campaign here: http://www.actionaid.org.uk/102267/take_action_on_biofuels.html
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Agrofuels the current status of the threat they pose to civilisation on Earth
Rupert Read
ActionAid, 17 March 2010
http://www.actionaid.org.uk/100621/blog.html?article=1517

Let's start with this, from the agrofuels-mad U.S. of A. One remarkable detail that stands out in this (worrying) article is that the Environmental Protection Agency (sic.) analysis here accounts for the reduction in food consumption which is associated with using foodstuffs for fuel as a GHG benefit”¦ Quick translation: Starving people is supposed to be good for the planet! That moment of madness tells you a lot about the rise of agrofuels, which is all about profit, and none about reducing GHG emissions, let along about being good for people.

The issue of land-use being altered away from food toward fuels is big in Europe right now too. Take this newspaper headline, again from just last week: 'Four environmental groups have sued the European Union's executive for withholding documents they say will add to a growing dossier of evidence that biofuels harm the environment and push up food prices'. In November 2008, eight of the largest agrofuel-producing countries, including Brazil and Indonesia, threatened the EU that they would go to the WTO if restrictions on agrofuels-influenced land-use change were not removed: this was following a massive lobbying effort by agrofuel companies in Brussels. Yet land-use-effects have by far the greatest negative climatic impacts of agrofuels. Removing any land use restrictions gives producer countries a free license to destroy vital ecosystems and habitats

”¦ Bottom-line: If we want to feed people, rather than cars, and if we want to stop rainforests etc. being trashed to set up monocultures, then we must stop agrofuels companies and mass-producer states from dominating the debate. The actions of these four environmental groups in taking the EU to court over this is thus very welcome.

But there has been bad news as well as good lately for those of us campaigning against agrofuels. Take this Guardian article for instance. The recent draft communication from the European Commission to the European Parliament on the sustainability of biofuels says naturalforests have to be protected. But the devil is in the definition of a forest. The document says:

'Continuously forested areas are defined as areas where trees have reached, or can reach, a height of five metres, making up a crown cover of more than30%. They would normally include natural forest, forest plantations and other plantations such as palm oil. This means that a change from orest to oil palm would not per se constitute a breach of the criterion (for sustainability)'.

 - If plantation bosses succeed in redefining palm oil as forestry then that will attract double subsidies from European taxpayers - for managing forests and for producing agrofuels. Double subsidies for ripping up rainforests!

The hugest long-term threat posed by the agrofuels business is in greenwashing aviation. The aviation industry is 'committed' to reducing their CO2 by more than 90% by 2050. This is simply and utterly impossible, given the industry’s massive expansion plans. So the aviation industry pretends that they will put the entire aviation sector on to agrofuels, and greenwashes their emissions in the process. The problem is that agrofuels, in part for the reasons given above, are far more destructive to the environment (in most cases) than kerosene”¦

Last but not least, check this out. This email, that some MEPs received last week from the dismal Burston Marsteller PR firm, and that at least one of them had the courage to pass onto us and thus to make public, will give you some idea of the kind of massive lobbying effort that the agrofuels profiteers are currently engaged in, as they endeavour to replace biodiversity and resilience with monocultures and temporary profits.  

I've been campaigning against industrial biofuels for nearly a decade now. It is absolutely vital that we have politicians in Westminster as well as in Brussels who are committed to being truly green, not to the ludicrous greenwash of agrofuels. Please think about that, in the run-up to May 6th.

[Rupert Read is a Norwich Green Party Councillor, and Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia]

(Many thanks to Andrew Boswell, Mark Crutchley and other friends and colleagues who helped me research this piece.)