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Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Biofuels and world hunger - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...68865

biofuels agribusiness development international agriculture foodsecurity security crisis food pambazuka

shared by Arabica Robusta on 05 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Biofuels are conservatively estimated to have been responsible for at least 30 per cent of the global food price spike in 2008 that pushed 100 million people into poverty and drove some 30 million more into hunger, according to the report, Meals per gallon, released by the UK charity ActionAid in February 2010 [1]. The number of chronically hungry people now exceeds one billion.
  • If all global biofuels targets are to be met, food prices could rise by up to an additional 76 per cent by 2020 and starve an extra 600 million people.
  • While driving up food prices can create hunger, driving people off the land that they have traditionally cultivated deprives them of the last resort of growing their own food. This is happening all over the developing world. In Mozambique, farms are destroyed for industrial biofuels. Elisa Alimone Mongue, mother and farmer said: ‘I don't have a farm, I don't have a garden … the only land I have has been destroyed. We are just suffering with hunger … even if I go to look for another farm, they will just destroy it again.’
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  • Julio Ngoene is fighting to save his community and its way of life. He is the village chief of approximately 100 households of more than 1,000 people. A biofuel company is setting up a project near his village and has taken over 80 per cent of the village farmland without permission, and destroyed the crops. At the beginning of the project, the company promised to resettle the village, but two years later, Julio and the villagers have still heard nothing, and no one in the village has received compensation.
  • There have been warnings against jatropha biodiesel going back several years [3] (Jatropha Biodiesel Fever in India, SiS 36). Jatropha has been hyped as a miracle non-food biofuel crop that would simply grow in marginal areas not suitable for food crops. But there was clear evidence that it would only deliver anywhere near the promised 1,300 litres of oil per ha when grown in fertile land with plenty of water, and that's what companies have set their eyes on.
  • But this year I could not get much because of the trees that have been cut. Now they have destroyed the trees so we have lost a good source of income forever, yet we have not been paid anything in compensation. That is why I confronted the white man at the meeting.’
  • Brazil is the largest industrial biofuel producer in the developing world, where the sugar cane (ethanol) plantation industry is well established. However, working conditions are often poor. Of the one million cane workers, about half are employed as cutters, mostly done by hand, in intense heat for long hours; and a number of deaths have been reported.
  • Arabica Robusta on 05 Dec 10
     
    Biofuels are conservatively estimated to have been responsible for at least 30 per cent of the global food price spike in 2008 that pushed 100 million people into poverty and drove some 30 million more into hunger, according to the report, Meals per gallon, released by the UK charity ActionAid in February 2010 [1]. The number of chronically hungry people now exceeds one billion.
Arabica Robusta

UPDATE 3-Biofuels major driver of food price rise-World Bank | Markets | Reuters - 0 views

uk.reuters.com/...idUKN2861501620080728

biofuels crisis food security

shared by Arabica Robusta on 01 Aug 08 - Cached
  • World Bank economist Don Mitchell concluded that biofuels and related low grain inventories, speculative activity, and food export bans pushed prices up by 70 percent to 75 percent.
  • "The large increases in biofuels production in the U.S. and EU were supported by subsidies, mandates and tariffs on imports," Mitchell said in the research, which looks at rapid rises in food prices since 2002. "Without these policies, biofuels production would have been lower and food commodity price increases would have been smaller."
  • Bob Dineen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association, said the report showed a bias by the author against biofuels and underestimates the impact of higher energy prices and a weak dollar on higher food costs. "Such a simplistic approach fails to accurately and honestly account for the myriad of factors driving food costs higher," Dineen said. "I encourage the author and the World Bank to revisit the issue without bias, taking into account the increasingly significant role biofuels are playing in reducing global oil demand."
Arabica Robusta

Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...biofuels.renewableenergy

bank biofuel crisis development food international security world

shared by Arabica Robusta on 06 Jul 08 - Cached
  • Arabica Robusta on 06 Jul 08
     
    Supporters of biofuels argue that they are a greener alternative to relying on oil and other fossil fuels, but even that claim has been disputed by some experts, who argue that it does not apply to US production of ethanol from plants. "It is clear that some biofuels have huge impacts on food prices," said Dr David King, the government's former chief scientific adviser, last night. "All we are doing by supporting these is subsidising higher food prices, while doing nothing to tackle climate change."
Arabica Robusta

The European Civil Society Round-Up: Food security as key: New biofuels report - 0 views

wdev-newsblog.blogspot.com/...urity-as-key-new-biofuels.html

biofuels development food foodsecurity international security

shared by Arabica Robusta on 24 Apr 08 - Cached
  • Arabica Robusta on 24 Apr 08
     
    a new study released by the Common Fund for Commodities at an international forum on biofuels held recently in Kuala Lumpur. "Fundamentally, there is a link between poverty reduction and biofuels sector development that can be promoted," said Ambassador Ali Mchumo, the managing director of the Common Fund in Amsterdam.
Arabica Robusta

Virtual land grabs and climate change - 0 views

farmlandgrab.org/13069

cap european union biofuel organic agriculture

shared by Arabica Robusta on 25 May 10 - Cached
  • ‘expanding the acreage of organically farmed land to 20% would increase virtual land importation by almost 30%. And policies to achieve the EU’s 10% biofuel objective would also increase the rate of land-grabs’. Perhaps the EU would be better of withdrawing its subsidies in order to protect the climate.
  • Arabica Robusta on 25 May 10
     
    "'expanding the acreage of organically farmed land to 20% would increase virtual land importation by almost 30%. And policies to achieve the EU's 10% biofuel objective would also increase the rate of land-grabs'. Perhaps the EU would be better of withdrawing its subsidies in order to protect the climate."
Arabica Robusta

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Brazil president defends biofuels - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...7351766.stm

biofuels brazil development food international lula security

shared by Arabica Robusta on 23 Apr 08 - Cached
  • Arabica Robusta on 23 Apr 08
     
    Food prices were going up, he said, because people in developing countries like China, India and Brazil itself were simply eating more as their economic conditions improved.
  • Arabica Robusta on 23 Apr 08
     
    Biofuel as an export crop: Lula says it is no problem
Arabica Robusta

Let them eat ethanol - 0 views

www.socialistworker.org/...669_03_Ethanol.shtml

biofuels crisis economic ethanol food international neoliberal

shared by Arabica Robusta on 23 Apr 08 - Cached
  • Arabica Robusta on 23 Apr 08
     
    Now, the law of supply and demand has dictated that the market for biofuels should reduce the production of corn for food by 25 percent in the U.S., triggering a rise in corn prices that has encouraged speculators to hoard crops...
Arabica Robusta

BRAZIL: Agribusiness Driving Land Concentration - IPS ipsnews.net - 0 views

www.ipsnews.net/news.asp

brazil land corporate exploitation biofuels

shared by Arabica Robusta on 06 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Arabica Robusta on 06 Oct 09
     
    From the census figures by state, analysts observe that in areas like São Paulo, the planting of more sugarcane is associated with a 6.1 percent increase in land concentration compared to the previous census, thanks to incentives for the production of biofuels, like ethanol.\n\nThose responsible for the IBGE survey, presented Sept. 30, said the situation in the state of São Paulo shows that one of the main factors in the concentration of land ownership is the expansion of agribusiness and large monoculture crops for export, such as soybeans and maize.
Arabica Robusta

Resist/Submit: Biofuels, corporate agriculture and the predicted crisis of land and food - 0 views

pickinjava.blogspot.com/...corporate-agriculture-and.html

land reform food security corporate agriculture agribusiness resist_submit pambazuka biofuels international development oakland institute

shared by Arabica Robusta on 11 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Arabica Robusta on 11 Oct 09
     
    "It is wrong to burn the food of the poor to drive the cars of the rich."
Arabica Robusta

farmlandgrab.org | Tanzanian villagers pay for biofuel investment disaster - 1 views

farmlandgrab.org/21192

africa development international news governance land grab tenure tanzania biofuel

shared by Arabica Robusta on 28 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Arabica Robusta on 28 Oct 12
     
    How multinational land grab corporations work with "independent and democratic" governments to appropriate rural property in Tanzania.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Food crisis in the Sahel: Real problem, false solutions - 0 views

pambazuka.org/...66292

food security international crisis development agriculture agribusiness foodsecurity pambazuka agrofuels agroecology sovereignty biofuels

shared by Arabica Robusta on 31 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Tidiane Kassé cautions that by tackling the consequences rather than the causes of the crisis, the region’s people are likely to remain vulnerable to hunger.
  • In contrast with other former French colonies in Africa, where independence parades have been held in a manner devoid of substance and sense (and built on the failings which have reinforced the links of subject to metropole and other examples of power –political, economic, etc), Niamey’s authorities are to limit themselves to a military parade on 3 August. With symbolism put aside, the reality needs to be faced up to: some 8 million Nigeriens – or half the country’s population – are affected by the famine.
  • In addition to the 8 million affected Nigeriens are some 1.6 million Chadians and 500,000 Malians. These statistics are only, however, the visible aspect that institutions and international non-governmental organisations display. They suffer from the limits around reading data on Africa, notably on rural areas and a region of the Sahel in which pastoral traditions and a nomadic lifestyle are a prominent feature.
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  • n the face of empty granaries, Niger’s people have begun to develop a strategy for survival. ‘In Niger, women cover a desert-like environment in search of anthills in order to dig up and retrieve grains of millet, corn and other crops that the ants have collected,’ tells Charles Bambara, in charge of communications for Oxfam GB in Dakar. In the north of Mali, farmers, keen to allow their livestock to drink, have taken to using the water points actually intended for elephants (in a bid to protect the last pachyderms alive in the country).
  • The disorder of the world food crisis in 2008 did not become hazy, and this new peak comes to remind us that, in the Sahel, the crisis results from an endemic problem. This is a problem that, as the thrust of recurrent fever testifies, is more a question of structure than conjuncture, that these are the failings of agricultural policies that impose their own tough realities, and that the recommended solutions are not different from those pushed in the 1980s with the establishing of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) which sounded the death knell of Africa’s agricultural policies.
  • The reduced investment imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank had then destroyed the base of an agriculture geared towards food sovereignty. Industrial cultures were promoted which washed the soil (leading to greater soil erosion, the use of pesticides and chemical fertiliser) and disrupted the balance of the systems of production behind subsistence and the generation of complementary revenues on the strength of access to local markets. From this point it was a question of food security, no matter where stocks came from. This was the period in which food aid poured in. Africa was to produce no longer, with African stomachs wagered on agricultural surpluses from Europe, the US and elsewhere. As a result, since 1980 sub-Saharan Africa has been the only region of the world where average per capita food production has continued to decline over the last 40 years.[3]
  • African agriculture has suffered a series of difficulties which, over 30 years, have left it vulnerable to the smallest of changes on both the international market and climatically. Agricultural policies applied by states, under donors’ pressure, have in effect turned their back on policies which, formerly, assured technical assistance to producers, backed up by a price-stabilisation mechanism and subsidies for commodities.
  • We could go even further towards the worst of it and look at the development of biofuels and the extent to which more and more land is being diverted away from food production. Essentially, we will be growing to power cars rather than fill granaries. And in July this year, Burkina Faso has inaugurated its first industrial unit of production, while the country remains vulnerable in the face of a food crisis.
  • ‘Today, in the smallest village, people eat bread, milk and coffee… This wasn’t part of our customs; we used to eat maize-based dough, sorghum and millet. But when you can’t live anymore from your field and you’re reliant on others (neighbours, food aid), you eat what you’re given.
  • The foundation of real food sovereignty lies in the promotion and consolidation of family agriculture, as well as the development of an agro-ecology which offers the best antidote to the wasting-away of fragile ecosystems at the mercy of deregulation.
Arabica Robusta

Food | The silent tsunami | Economist.com - 0 views

www.economist.com/...displayStory.cfm

shared by Arabica Robusta on 25 Apr 08 - Cached
  • In general, governments ought to liberalise markets, not intervene in them further. Food is riddled with state intervention at every turn, from subsidies to millers for cheap bread to bribes for farmers to leave land fallow. The upshot of such quotas, subsidies and controls is to dump all the imbalances that in another business might be smoothed out through small adjustments onto the one unregulated part of the food chain: the international market. For decades, this produced low world prices and disincentives to poor farmers. Now, the opposite is happening. As a result of yet another government distortion—this time subsidies to biofuels in the rich world—prices have gone through the roof. Governments have further exaggerated the problem by imposing export quotas and trade restrictions, raising prices again. In the past, the main argument for liberalising farming was that it would raise food prices and boost returns to farmers. Now that prices have massively overshot, the argument stands for the opposite reason: liberalisation would reduce prices, while leaving farmers with a decent living.
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 25 Apr 08
       
      The "incentive" argument, focussed on biofuel subsidies.
Arabica Robusta

World Bank and UN carbon offset scheme 'complicit' in genocidal land grabs - NGOs | Naf... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...land-carbon-grab-sengwer-kenya

food security international development agriculture crisis agribusiness foodsecurity biofuels monsanto coercive conservation

shared by Arabica Robusta on 04 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • In west Kenya, as the UK NGO Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) reported, over a thousand homes had been torched by the government's Kenya Forest Service (KFS) to forcibly evict the 15,000 strong Sengwer indigenous people from their ancestral homes in the Embobut forest and the Cherangany Hills.
  • Under the REDD scheme companies in the developed world purchase carbon credits to invest in reducing emissions from forested lands. Those credits turn up on the companies' balance sheets as carbon reductions. In practice, however, REDD schemes largely allow those companies to accelerate pollution while purchasing land and resources in the developing world at bargain prices.
  • A letter to the Bank in March by No REDD in Africa network (Nran) – a group of African civil society organisations - signed by over 60 international NGOs accused the Bank with the above words of "both admitting its complicity in the forced relocation of the Sengwer People as well as offering to collude with the Kenyan government to cover-up cultural genocide."
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  • ony La Viña, Dean of the Ateneo School of Government and chair of the intergovernmental REDD negotiations at the climate conferences in Copenhagen and Durban, said: "The carbon markets, when up and running, need to support the forest stewardship of the people who live there, and not provide national governments with yet another tool to dispossess their citizens from the natural resources they have cared for and depended on for generations." According to the No REDD in Africa network, it is precisely because indigenous people and their rights are not factored into REDD principles that their implementation could lead to outright genocide.
Arabica Robusta

IPS - Food Security and the Failure of Mechanisation in DRC | Inter Press Service - 0 views

www.ipsnews.net/...ailure-of-mechanisation-in-drc

food security international agriculture development crisis agribusiness foodsecurity biofuels drc

shared by Arabica Robusta on 25 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Mechanisation was expected to transform agriculture in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s central province of East Kasaï. But a project to offer tractors for ploughing land has fallen flat. Meanwhile, many households don’t have enough to eat because agricultural production in this mineral-rich province is too low.
  • He said that would encourage smallholders to progressively abandon the hoe, because they would all like to cultivate larger plots and produce more.
  • Back in 2007, the provincial governor proclaimed agriculture the “priority of priorities”. The announcement was greeted warmly by farmers, who saw this as a new beginning for the agriculture and livestock sectors, which had declined steadily for three decades, following the liberalisation of artisanal diamond mining in 1982.
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  • “They charged me 35 dollars per hectare to rent a tractor, besides the charge for the tractor operator and his assistant. I also had to pay for 40 litres of diesel at 2.50 dollars per litre. It was too expensive for me,” Mudila told IPS. “We are in a diamond-rich province where people have lost sight of how agriculture works,” said Tshibanza. “It makes no sense to want to have access to the tractor service for free. The tractors have to be maintained and their parts replaced.”
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