The
European Union and agrofuels: making the unsustainable “sustainable”
Palm, soybean,
cane and other crops continue to expand at the expense of tropical
forests and other fundamental ecosystems. The local indigenous,
Afro-Latin American and peasant populations are being seriously
affected and dispossessed of their lands and way of life. The
European Union wants to justify the accelerated introduction of
agrofuels into its territory, establishing supposedly sustainable
criteria. However, before making full assessments, consulting
with the populations involved and establishing these criteria,
the obligatory objectives or percentages of agrofuels to be mixed
with fossil fuels have already been fixed. The percentages are
so high (5.75% until 2010 and 10% until 2020) that many analyses
claim that they are impossible to attain. This way of making policies
suggests that the sustainability criteria will, once again, be
a “green wash” system to confuse public opinion and
will only benefit the large companies taking over what already
appears to be the business of the future.
Before establishing
regulations and obligations affecting the countries of the South,
the industrialized countries should have carried out a more exhaustive
analysis of the impacts of their national policies on the so-called
development of producer countries. Even before the policies have
been fully defined, the business is expanding in the countries
of the South, razing the Amazon forest and other forests in the
tropical belt, devastating indigenous territories, including the
indigenous people themselves, Afro-descendent populations and
biodiversity and all that is found along its way. Major contradictions
arise from the fact that an attempt is being made to present a
purely commercial activity as the solution to real and serious
environmental and climate change problems, which unfortunately
cannot be answered by the implementation of the agrofuels market.
What is more,
the lack of coherence in conduct, the lack of coordination among
the involved and affected sectors and the political agendas in
the North and South – that are greatly related to this attempt
at accommodating the very different reality of trade with environmental
protection – threaten to create irremediable social problems
among the extremely vulnerable populations in the producer countries
of the South. Indigenous and Afro-Latin Americans are being cast
out to extinction and peasants are being evicted from rural areas.
Furthermore,
the economic sustainability of some industries would seem to depend
on a continuous threat to climate and planetary stability. Presently,
the environmental and social impacts of raw material production
for agrofuels in the countries of the South, in response to demand
from the countries of the North, have connotations which are a
matter of serious concern to those affected in communities and
social and environmental organizations. Not only due to current
events, but also because of the possibility that this state of
affairs will multiply in an exponential and irremediable way.
The prices of land and food are increasing considerably. In order
to produce agrofuels, tropical forests are being felled, affecting
their biodiversity and the way of life of those inhabiting these
ecosystems. Additionally, large amounts of agrochemicals are needed,
polluting the population, soils and waters.
In Ecuador, the
Afro-descendent communities from La Chiquita and indigenous Awa
from Guadualito, recently won non-appealable Constitutional Protection,
whereby after a lengthy legal process, the Ministry of the Environment
of that country is obliged to control pollution of water sources
by oil palm producers and to take the corresponding measures to
reverse such pollution. According to a report verifying the expansion
of monoculture African palm plantations in that same region, “intensive
deforestation is a requisite for the expansion of oil palm crops,
because the plantations are being established in natural forest
areas.”
The European
Union is including among its regulations the condition of sustainability
for raw material imports from the countries of the South of agrofuels,
but presently it has no system guaranteeing enforcement of social
and environmental standards. What is more, no social and environmental
certification seal currently being applied in other similar fields
has the initially desired results. On the contrary, the system
taken as a reference, the well-known Forest Stewardship Council
FSC forestry certification seal, has given rise to numerous complaints
(1) ranging from irregularities
regarding environmental aspects to serious violations of human
rights, made possible by the critical defects in the certification
system structure. On-going initiatives to certify agrofuel sustainability
have a predominant participation by governments and other first
world institutions, companies and organizations favouring their
interests, but that do not consider the present impacts or the
concerns of social organizations in the South, or of the potentially
affected populations. This is pure “green wash.”
All this leads
to the following question: “What sustainability are we talking
about?” An acceptable definition of the concept of sustainability
would imply protection or sound environmental management, conservation
of culture and heritage and long-term economic and social wellbeing
of the local communities. Additionally, at the present time, mitigation
of the impacts of global warming on the climate should also be
mentioned. In this case, in the race for agrofuel trade, there
does not seem to be much concern for the conservation of culture
or heritage, or the environment or long-term welfare and the climate
is being used as an “excuse.”
The agrofuel
boom seems to consist of conquering the widest spectrum possible
of this market in the least time possible, in order to win a furiously-paced
race. What is more, in the way this business is being presented,
its introduction enables companies to use the discourse to show
themselves as environmental protectionists and ecologists (with
Al Gore as the most outstanding representative of this species)..
If the industrialized
nations develop sustainability schemes without the intervention
of producer countries, the reality and the socio-environmental
priorities of the latter will not be reflected. What is more,
in many cases, these priorities are unclear, even within the producer
countries themselves. In most cases their policies are strongly
influenced by transnational companies and policies supporting
them, such as those of the World Bank, IBD, international cooperation
agencies, etc. For this reason it is the small farmers, the local
population and the poorest people who run the risk of paying all
expenses, as at present.
For all these
reasons, the countries of the North have the obligation to consider
the impacts of their agrofuel trade policies on other parts of
the world, namely in the countries of the South.
- Cases of impacts from the production of agrofuel
The production
of agrofuel requires a type of large-scale monoculture production,
known as agribusiness, which displaces small farmers, violates
peasant rights by affecting their continuation on their farms
and their food sovereignty, in addition to destroying the environment
and biodiversity. Soybean in Paraguay, sugar-cane in Brazil and
oil palm in Colombia are monoculture plantations replacing natural
tropical forests and plantations of food crops which the population
depends on for subsistence.
Paraguay: the
population of this country, acutely affected by soybean plantations,
reports serious cases of violation of human rights. The production
of soybeans has nothing sustainable about it here. Communities
such as the Tekojoja are being dusted and poisoned by agrochemicals
that make the inhabitants sick. Those who have tried to oppose
the plantations and defend themselves are threatened, intimidated
and reported by the soybean producers. Six peasant leaders are
killed on an average every year in the context of resistance to
agribusiness. This is only a part of the tragic results generated
by the close on 2.6 million hectares of transgenic soybeans planted
in Paraguay. Another aspect that is being denounced is the local
population and organizations’ concern over the construction
of a grain port to process and trade soybeans in a neighbourhood
in the capital of the country, an installation that threatens
the health of a major part of the urban population due to its
location and the irregularities that occurred while getting this
major work approved.
Brazil: Here
the social organizations have reported that new lands given over
to the production of ethanol are threatening fundamental ecosystems,
such as Amazonia and the Pantanal region. It is argued that sugar
cane cannot be planted in Amazonia, but even so, pressure is increasing
as other areas are allocated to sugar cane plantations, displacing
the agricultural frontier towards Amazonia. The sugar cane industry
is using slave and semi-slave labour. This is the situation of
one million rural workers who, during the 2006-2007 season harvested
425 million tons of sugar-cane from 6 million hectares of land.
Labour complaints include 12 hour-working days, hunger, trafficking
(purchase sale) of people, sub-human living conditions and salaries
below the minimum wage. These conditions affect 80% of all sugar-cane
workers. The extreme is the death of sugar cane workers be it
from exhaustion, carbonized from burns or due to labour accidents
(450 workers died during 2006 and 1,383 over the past five years
according to the Brazilian Ministry of Labour). Sugar-cane cutters
are treated like machines and they are expected to cut from 6
to 10 tons per worker per day. The genetically modified varieties
are lighter and therefore demand a greater effort from the worker
to obtain the same yield because the workers are paid according
to the weight of the amount of sugar cane harvested.
Colombia: in
this country the situation leads to extreme violence, in this
case related with oil palm plantations. The Justice and Peace
Inter-Ecclesiastical Commission reported strategies for police
and military control and repression in rural areas, financed by
companies that benefit from public resources as incentives for
the establishment of oil palm agribusiness. The abuses reported
by the victims of the oil palm invasion include the invasion of
their originating territories for the establishment of monoculture
plantations, court persecution of those attempting to defend themselves,
impunity vis-à-vis the denunciations and permanent militarization
of the areas. Since 2001, over 110 crimes have been reported without
a single investigation being made of the identified accused. Moreover,
the strategy being used is that of shifting responsibility to
the victims, who end up by being accused. According to the complaints
by the affected communities, in the context of the Colombian Choco,
plantation of oil palm is not only unsustainable but illegal.
The socio-cultural identity of the local Afro-Colombian population
is being seriously threatened by a business-tax development model.
The environment and biodiversity have also been destroyed (2)
In this can be
summarized the energy that Europe sells as clean and that European
citizens in their vast majority are accepting as such, before
the almost total absence of disagreement and questioning by public
opinion to legislators regarding this barbarity.
And considering
the critical situation reflected in the three cases set out here
very briefly, it is a matter of concern that European Union policies
presently under discussion threaten to increase and worsen all
these situations in an exponential way, based on a concept that
in this case is poorly formulated and that confuses public opinion,
such as in the case of sustainability.
Nobody wants
to give anything up. The companies do not want to give up a growing
business that promises extraordinary benefits. Government agendas
appear to be dominated by the companies that are beneficiaries
or potential beneficiaries in this multimillionaire business succeeding
the oil industry, at least with the flippancy with which laws
and regulations are being established. However, all this with
European frontiers well closed and increasingly closed, heaven
forbid that the innumerable displaced people in the Global South
should attempt to get into “the home.”
The consumers
do not want to give up their standard of living which implies
an excessive use of energy in their daily lives, including individual
transport, responsibility for 20% of global emissions of CO2.
Nobody seems
to be suggesting serious and really effective policies for energy
saving, nor a drop in the current excessive and exaggerated levels
of consumption. It is significant that any of the Latin American
countries where a major part of agrofuel commodities are planned,
has significantly lower levels of CO2 emissions. In order to address
the energy crisis, the countries of the North must save energy,
proposing effective strategies leading to a significant drop in
the level of energy expenditure.
In order to clarify
all these contradictions, over 190 organizations from the North
and South are asking for a moratorium of 5 years for agrofuels
(3) . Recently the UN special
rapporteur on food security, Jean Ziegler, also alluded in his
report to the need for a moratorium.
Presently, there
is no common internationally accepted and agreed on by consensus
definition of “sustainable agrofuels.” Therefore politicians,
citizens of the European Community, let us be honest: What are
we talking about when we speak of sustainability for the production
of agrofuels? Does it mean that the producer companies are always
ensured of a supply of raw material for the production of fuels
such as agro-diesel and agro-ethanol? of maintaining an ostentatious
and wasteful way of life? Perhaps it would be more just and human
to be concerned about the indigenous and peasant people in the
Global South being ensured for ever of their environment and in
particular of the last tropical forests left, their food sovereignty
and way of life.
Varied bibliography
and documentation prepared from the South in Spanish on the impacts
of agrofuels on the countries of the South in: www.stop-agrocombustibles.nireblog.com.
Documentation and information in English: www.biofuelwatch.org
1
- See http://www.fsc-watch.org
2
- La Tramoya. Derechos Humanos y Palma Aceitera. Curvaradó
y Jiguamiandó
3
- The text of the moratorium is available in various languages,
among them Spanish, English, German, and Italian. Text and demonstration
of support through www.econexus.info
By Guadalupe Rodriguez, Campaigner Tropical Forests and Human
Rights, Save the Forest, Latin America, e-mail: Guadalupe@regenwald.org,
www.salvalaselva.org
