Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

We continue our cautionary tales regarding biofuels. While the Western world goes about looking for crops it can turn into fuels for our cars and trucks, questions continue about the impact the biofuels industry will have on the world’s ability to feed itself.

Yesterday, the NY Times had an article about jatropha, the latest wonder-weed. The stuff grows in bad rocky soils, places where food crops cannot be grown, and needs little water, no pesticides and little in the way of fertilizers. It produces a poisonous seed that just happens to be ideal as a biofuel, much more efficient than corn or sugarcane. It has the potential to put previously unproductive lands into cultivation, affording profits to farmers rich and poor around the world.

Big oil companies have taken note, especially in Europe where there is a relentless appetite for biofuels but few domestic sources. European countries are trying to go green, and they are doing it more and more at the expense of the environments of poor countries — kind of like colonialism always did.

We have posted about this before. Palm oil has been one of the sources of choice in Europe and the result has been a massive increase in palm plantations in countries like Indonesia with massive deforestation as a result. The thirst for palm oil is bankrupting the future of these countries and helping to ensure that that the ecological undermining of the planet will continue apace.

Jatropha offers a different possibility. It can be grown by poor farmers who have a chance to make a profit. It can be grown between rows and fences amidst food crops, so it does not necessarily undermine their food production.

But watch out. Watch out when big oil companies get interested. In whose hands will production remain, and who will reap the benefits? And once they are involved (and, of course, they already are), the chance that production will be limited to bad soils is, what? Nil, don’t you think?

I leave you to read this article at your leisure, but be sure to go all the way to the end where it talks about how production of jatropha could end up undermining the production and availability of food in countries like Mali, the nation that is the focus of this story. It is one thing to say that this stuff grows on unproductive soils and that poor farmers can cultivate it. But you know as well as I do that once big oil companies get involved and profits go up, jatropha will not be limited only to those soils, nor are the poor likely to reap the financial rewards unless a very strict regimen is set up to protect their interests.

It would be a real horror if in poor nations like this, farmers would find the value of their land increasing because of jatropha and then would find themselves being bought out by oil companies and other corporate interests. I worked on the Central America region for 25 years and we saw this over and over again in regard to all sorts of products, as well as human labor, that corporate interests sought to exploit. Biofuels, with their seemingly unlimited market potential given the energy needs of the world, have the potential of distorting the economies of poor countries like nothing we have seen since oil itself.

As a United Nations report on biofuels indicates — quoted at the end of this article:

…biofuels programs can also result in a concentration of ownership that could drive the world’s poorest farmers off their land and into deeper poverty.

And all that because we don’t want to get out of our cars or be told that we can’t buy SUVs anymore.

In both the search for fuels to replace oil and gas, and in our growing use of them, we must remain conscious at all times of the impact production and consumption will have on the poor of our world. We must ensure that our thirst for oil for our vehicles does not undermine the well-being, dignity, and hopes of the 2-3 billion poor among us. We must not power our vehicles on the hunger of others.

Fortunately, there is international opposition to the mass production of this and other biofuels. Here is one example. Let’s add our voices, shall we?

[tags] jatropha, biofuels, biofuels and poverty, biofuels impact on food production[/tags]

Photo credit: African Centre for Plant Oil Technology