Sometimes, even pessimists find themselves admitting their predictions have been too sanguine. Four years ago, Dennis Avery warned that, as Western governments fell head over heels for biofuels, passing laws forcing consumers to buy them, “U.S. farmers, who should be exporting food to densely populated Asian countries with rising incomes, will instead turn their corn into ethanol … without benefit to the environment.”
As growers worldwide cashed in on the sudden appetite for biofuels, he predicted in 2006, there would erupt a “clash between food and forests.”
Farmers would clear new swaths of land for fuel crops, predicted Mr. Avery, president of the Center for Global Food Issues, affiliated with Washington’s Hudson Institute.
That message made the former senior agricultural analyst for the U.S. State Department unpopular among farmers, who liked the sound of a new market for grain. He takes no pleasure in knowing his prophecies have come to pass. After all, even he didn’t realize things would happen as quickly as they have. “I knew it would be bad. But I would never have believed it would get this bad this quickly,” he says. “It’s appalling.”
In barely a half-decade, biofuels have turned from the darling of environmentalists and policymakers — confident that petrol made from corn, soybeans or other plants would not just relieve us of our dependency on volatile Arab oil, but reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the process — to the target of blame for massive economic upheaval and environmental destruction.
The UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food recently labelled biofuels a “crime against humanity,” for burning crops that could be used to fight hunger, as fuel. “The farms have been put to biofuel production creating a shortage of food and therefore creating a problem of high prices,” said Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete, president of the African Union this week. As he spoke, violent demonstrations over rising food costs in Haiti had killed five people and wounded 40 more, mirroring similar riots in Mexico, Egypt and Cameroon. Other countries are banning grain exports to ration scarce supplies.
It hasn’t helped that green groups now say the promise of lower carbon emissions has not materialized — or at least the reductions (corn-based ethanol is said to produce between zero and 30% less carbon dioxide than old-fashioned fossil fuels) don’t justify the devastating ripple effects — while the powerful push for more plant energy has led to a rapid rise in environmentally-stressful fertilizer usage, and worldwide deforestation.
“It seems almost a necessary consequence, when you take land out of production for growing food, then you take it for producing fuel, then that’s going to have an impact on the price of grains and commodities, and that’s going to increase … farmers moving onto more marginal lands creating deforestation” says Greenpeace agricultural campaigner Josh Brandon. “I think it’s becoming pretty clear across NGOs and in Europe, as well as in North America, that biofuels generally are becoming more of an environmental problem than a solution.”
European lawmakers seem anxious to brake the biofuel bandwagon. On Thursday, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called on G8 countries “urgently to examine the impact on food prices of different kinds and production methods of biofuels, and ensure that their use is responsible and sustainable.”
France’s Agriculture Minister has promised to unveil proposals at next week’s European Union agriculture council that will ensure “absolute priority must be given to agricultural production for food” over biofuels. Germany’s Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said this month that he was considering cancelling laws requiring a minimum of 10% of petrol be plant-sourced by next year, and 17% by 2020.
Canada and the United States have not yet flagged in their support for corn-based fuel (Ottawa plans for roughly half our fuel supply to contain 10% ethanol by 2010; the U.S. requires fuel producers to quintuple their biofuel usage by 2022). The federal government recently shored up half a billion dollars in ethanol subsidies, and all three U.S. presidential contenders — including John McCain, who in 2003 said “Ethanol does nothing to reduce fuel consumption, nothing to increase our energy independence, nothing to improve air quality” — swear they’ll keep backing biofuels.
But, here, too the public mood shows signs of shifting. A peer-reviewed study in Science magazine last month suggests that, as countries bulldoze rainforest and peat swamp forests, considered critical “carbon sinks,” to expand biofuel crops, the net impact on carbon dioxide levels appears worse than sticking with oil. A think-tank based at McGill University, Resource Efficient Agricultural Production, told Parliament’s standing committee on agriculture in February that ethanol “won’t appreciably reduce GHG emissions.” In his influential New York Times column this week, leading liberal economist Paul Krugman called “the rise of demon ethanol … a terrible mistake.” Time magazine ran a cover story last month bluntly titled “The Clean Energy Scam.”
The industry itself insists it’s being unfairly fingered for problems it hasn’t caused, though Gordon Quaiattini, Canadian Renewable Fuels Association president, admits he is suddenly facing a major public relations problem. “We need to get the facts out, and we probably haven’t done a very good job in doing that,” he says, promising a coming campaign will debunk what he insists are misconceptions. Rising food prices, he explains, come from energy prices. All those skeptical academic studies, Mr. Quaiattini insists, are flawed. “Conspiracy theorists, I suspect, would argue that maybe it’s the oil industry promoting some of this stuff. I don’t have hard evidence of that, but I have anecdotal evidence,” he says. Besides, he notes, there are improvements down the road that will make ethanol even cleaner, while increasingly heavy oil production is only growing its carbon footprint.
Even biofuel critics agree there are positive varieties of the stuff, namely Brazilian sugar cane cellulosic ethanol, which has high energy yields and powers its own processing. But Brazilian growing conditions can’t be replicated in other climates, says Vaclav Smil, who studies environment, energy and food at the University of Manitoba. Meanwhile, Brazil itself can’t solely supply the world’s biofuel, even if it burns down every acre of rainforests, which it appears prepared to do.
“Even if you plant every acre … of U.S. farmland with high-ethanol corn … you would replace 12.5% of all U.S. gasoline consumption,” says Mr. Smil. That kind of benefit, he says, could just as easily be achieved through more efficient vehicles on the market today, without triggering agricultural turmoil. “Whenever we have a problem with society we are so simple minded, so primitive, that when we have looming shortage, we just want to say, ‘we need more,’ instead of looking at ways we can consume less.” No wonder a future filled with biofuel seemed so alluring at the time.
But with North American governments invested so heavily, backing off biofuels now could be painful. Both Washington and Ottawa relished ethanol’s ability to win political points with the farm lobby, dodging WTO rules blocking subsidies for feed (both nations tax ethanol imports).
But the political field is tilting. Cattle, turkey, chicken and pork producer associations, squeezed by feed prices, are demanding Congress abandon ethanol subsidies. The USDA’s latest planning report suggests that, for the first time in memory, there may not be enough U.S. feed available for the country’s record number of pigs and hogs in the coming year, possibly leading to culls that could only hurt the biofuel image, fairly or not.
“I would think the killing of little pigs will have an impact,” Mr. Avery says. “The cries of anguish from the [UN] World Food Program will ultimately have an impact.” And unless biofuel producers can reverse the mounting backlash, it won’t be long before North America’s urban voters notice that, with environmentalists, world bodies and foreign governments leaving the fold, the only group seemingly left standing up for biofuels appears to be the industry itself.