It doesn’t get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid; 40% of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops — cassava.
Several thousand hectares of farmland have been allocated to ethanol production in the Lavumisa district, the place worst hit by drought.
Surely it would be quicker and more humane to refine the Swazi people and put them in our tanks?
This is an example of a trade described by Jean Ziegler, the United Nations’s special rapporteur, as “a crime against humanity”. Ziegler took up the call for a five-year moratorium on all government targets and incentives for biofuel: the trade should be frozen until second-generation fuels — made from wood or straw or waste — become commercially available.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation recently announced the lowest global food reserves in 25 years, threatening “a very serious crisis”. Even when the price of food was low, 850-million people went hungry because they could not afford to buy it.
The cost of rice has risen by 20% in the past year, maize by 50%, wheat by 100%. Biofuels aren’t entirely to blame — by taking land out of food production they exacerbate the effects of bad harvests and rising demand — but almost all the major agencies warn against expansion. And almost all the major governments ignore them.
They turn away because biofuels offer a means of avoiding hard political choices. They create the impression that governments can cut carbon emissions and keep expanding the transport networks. New figures show that British drivers puttered past the 500-billion kilometre mark for the first time last year.
The law the British government passed recently — that by 2010 5% of United Kingdom road transport fuel must come from crops — will, it claims, save between 700 000 and 800 000 tons of carbon a year. If you count only the immediate carbon costs of planting and processing biofuels, they appear to reduce greenhouse gases. When you look at the total effect, you find they cause more warming than petroleum.
A recent study by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen shows that official estimates ignore the contribution of nitrogen fertilizers, which generate a greenhouse gas — nitrous oxide –296 times as powerful as carbon dioxide. These emissions alone ensure that ethanol from maize causes between 0,9 and 1,5 times as much warming as petrol, while rapeseed oil (the source of more than 80% of the world’s biodiesel) generates 1 to 1,7 times the effect of diesel.
Last year research group LMC International estimated that if the British and European target of a 5% contribution from biofuels were to be adopted by the rest of the world, the global acreage of cultivated land would expand by 15%. That means the end of most tropical forests. It might also cause runaway climate change.
The biofuels industry is punting jatropha, a tough weed with oily seeds. This winter Bob Geldof arrived in Swaziland as “special adviser” to a biofuels firm. Because it can grow on marginal land, jatropha, he said, is a “life-changing” plant that will offer jobs, cash crops and economic power to African smallholders.
It can grow on poor land and be cultivated by smallholders. But it can also grow on fertile land and be cultivated by largeholders. Biofuel is not a smallholder crop; it is an internationally traded commodity that travels well and can be stored indefinitely.
If the governments promoting biofuels do not reverse their policies, the humanitarian impact will be greater than that of the Iraq war. Millions will be displaced, hundreds of millions more could go hungry. — Â