Developing World Sees Wealth in Biofuel Production

While the environmental and agricultural downsides of first-generation biofuels are pushing some in the developed world away from their development, the economic allure in poorer countries seems too strong to ignore.

In Angola, a country still recovering from a 27-year-long civil war that ended in 2002, the government will begin regulating biofuel production in hopes of attracting billions of dollars in investments from abroad. Large sugarcane plantations for use in ethanol have already sprouted up, and the country hopes foreign companies will now invest heavily in such projects.

As is often the case with first-generation biofuel crops, there is concern that focusing on ethanol production will push out food crops, though. Angola already imports most of its food. According to the UN’s World Food Program, 35 percent of its population is undernourished. Still, Angola’s Agriculture Minister, Pedro Canga, stressed that only marginal lands would be used to grow biofuel crops, telling the country’s Parliament:

“There is no incompatibility between food production and biofuel production.”

While biofuel production might start with margin lands, it's unlike to find real success there, notes John Duxbury, an expert on biofuel production and global agricultural land use issues at Cornell University.

“If you have a marginal environment you get marginal productivity with biofuel crops just like any other crop,” he said. “So I’m not convinced that’s going to go anywhere.”

Mairon Bastos Lima, a biofuels policy researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies at VU University Amsterdam, foresees that leading to a growing conflict with food production:

“It is not only a risk but something that is already happening. Governments launching those biofuel programs will always claim that rural communities are not affected, but that should be showed clearly: What is meant by ‘marginal’ lands? What concrete measures are being taken to ensure that rural communities are not negatively affected?”

In Angola, the new law does require that companies coming into the country to produce biofuel must provide medical assistance and other basic necessities to people living nearby. Still, Lima thinks it may not be enough.

“Mere statements that ‘they will not be impacted’ may be just empty rhetoric,” he said. “I have spoken to Brazilian government authorities, for example, and they all deny any form of smallholder displacement or impacts on food production, but any research group who has done field work on that will tell you the exact opposite.”

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month supports Lima’s contention about Brazil.

Planned expansion of biofuel production in the country would displace more than 14,000 square kilometers of food cropland, and thousands more square kilometers of cattle rangelands, the authors, from Germany and UNEP in Kenya, write. To support food and livestock needs, some of those rangelands would expand into areas that are currently forested; clearly the food and environmental concerns with biofuel production are tightly interwoven.

Malaysian Palm Oil

In Malaysia, another new law will require that all vehicles in the country run on biofuel involving five percent processed palm oil by next year. The oil palm does not necessarily compete with food crops, but its production in Malaysia and Indonesia has come at the expense of huge swaths of those countries’ tropical rainforests.