After the Biofuel ‘fashion’, what next?

Without a fundamental shift in paradigm, a mere technological fix would potentially aggravate the inequity between the rich and the poor. This holds true in the case of biofuels. A transition to biofuels based on market fundamentalism will fail to increase the poor’s access to energy. Rather, it will merely repeat the world’s experience with fossil fuel energy where subsidies, market mechanisms and corporate control over technology have led to highly unequal access to energy, distorted prices, cartelised operations and environmental problems.
Following the path of its fossil predecessor, biofuel production is heavily subsidised especially in industrialised countries where the current demand is mostly concentrated. In the US, for example, estimates show that more than 200 support measures amount to $0.45-0.57 per litre for biodiesel and $0.38-0.49 per litre for ethanol. Without such subsidies, biofuels would not be able to compete with the heavily-subsidised and well-entrenched cartel distribution of fossil fuels.
With biofuels already heavily subsidised in the US and the EU, producers in developing countries are also demanding subsidies from their governments. Subsidy is also demanded based on the supposedly ‘environmentally friendly’ nature of biofuels. In reality once again, like in the case of conventional fossil fuel energy, environmental and social damages are being subsidised. New technology, same production, marketing and distribution patterns.
Without an accompanying shift in production and consumption patterns, developing countries are producing biofuels for another subsidised Northern industry and fuelling unsustainable lifestyles, while ignoring the basic energy needs of their own people. It is obvious that the EU, the US and perhaps other developed countries such as Japan cannot produce all of the biofuel supply that they need. Their companies are expanding into developing countries, where there is abundant land, cheap labour, and lax environmental and social regulations.
Sustaining the craze over biofuels would exact a heavy toll on world food security, pose serious pressures on the environment, and potentially aggravate inequity among and within countries. The craze is after all fed by heavy government subsidies in the North and continued reliance on fossil-fuel-based inputs.
Some projections show that the excitement over biofuels may be temporary, largely dependent on the price and supply of fossil fuels. As more and more developing countries enter the biofuels market, prices will inevitably start dipping. Developing countries could end up with millions of hectares of grain and oil crop plantations that could further result in a massive slump in prices.
Such damage may be irreparable as reconverting such lands to food crops may be too costly if not impossible. Developing countries stand in danger of replicating the disastrous experience of the 1980s when country after country, acting on World Bank policy advice, entered the primary commodities market producing the same crops, resulting in a market slump.
For economic reasons, poor farmers may be pressured to grow crops for biofuels rather than for food, while not having access to energy themselves. This would merely be a repeat of the numerous stories of large-scale hydropower plants displacing communities for the sake of providing energy to industries and cities while leaving poor villages in the same areas without electricity.
While biofuel ventures have been cited as sources of employment, it would not automatically improve the working and living conditions of workers in monocropping plantations. Worse, in a highly centralised and distorted energy production and distribution system, developing countries may be subsidising the energy needs of their industrial elite at the expense of the poor’s welfare.
Adopting biofuels as a technology fix would definitely not make the poor less marginalised and disempowered. To make a meaningful difference, a shift to biofuels, or any renewable energy source for that matter, would require a paradigm shift in energy and in production and consumption patterns. There is currently glaring inequity in energy distribution, where the rich, in the North and the South, consume and waste more energy while the multitude of poor do not have access to energy.
Provided there is a paradigm shift, biofuels have the potential to make a real contribution at the community level, based on the sustainable use of local resources, promotion of local energy efficiency and empowerment of communities in managing energy production and consumption. Experience has shown that community-based biofuel production, such as the jatropha project in Mali, can directly benefit the poor by increasing their access to an affordable and clean energy source as well as providing off-farm rural livelihood to farmers, especially women. The concept of energy sovereignty should be promoted. Only then can biofuel become a reliable, accessible, affordable and sustainable source of energy for the poor majority.
Biofuels developed in the ‘business as usual’ manner will only aggravate energy inequity. Doing this would only repeat the colonisation story of the South, which began with spices, then oil and genetic resources.
To prevent another such catastrophe, developing countries should make a careful, considered analysis of the pitfalls involved instead of simply jumping on board the biofuels bandwagon. Governments which are genuinely concerned about tackling the global energy crisis should avoid putting too much effort and their limited resources into one technological fix. Rather they should look into all local, clean energy sources such as wind, solar, hydropower and biogas from waste, mainly through community-based production to increase the poor’s access to energy and provide livelihood opportunities for the rural poor, especially women. Energy self-sufficiency must be the underlying paradigm of any energy technological development.