The Political Ecology of Agrofuels

Kristina Dietz, Bettina Engels, Oliver Pye, Achim Brunnengräber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317747437
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book explores the political ecology of agrofuels as an encompassing socio-spatial transformation process consisting of a series of changing contexts, political reconfigurations, and the restructuring of social and labour relations. It includes conceptual chapters as well as case studies from different world regions (North America, Europe, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia) and levels (local, national, transnational).

The Political Ecology of Agrofuels advances a conceptualisation of agrofuels that helps to fill existing research gaps. It covers global food regimes and agrarian politics as well as political arenas such as energy, climate, transport and trade. It reflects on the biophysical materiality of agrofuels, new forms of nature appropriation, struggles, discursive framings, the building of hegemony, shifting geopolitical constellations, socio-spatial configurations of power, the construction of territory, the agency of social movements and the different ways in which agrofuels are politicized at different scales.

This book asks how patterns of mobility, emissions regulation, food and energy production and consumption, and social relations (e.g. labour, class and gender relations) are shaped and re-shaped by the materiality and representations of agrofuels in both the Global South and North. The book provides tools for thinking about the diversity of the conflicts, struggles and spatial, socio-ecological and politico-economic reconfigurations and perpetuations engendered by current production and consumption patterns in the agrofuel sector.

1 An introduction to the political ecology of agrofuels

Kristina Dietz, Oliver Pye, Bettina Engels and Achim Brunnengräber

DOI: 10.4324/9781315795409-1

In recent years, agrofuels – i.e. substitutes for petrol and diesel made from plants – have been put forward as a partial technical solution to the crisis of global warming and peak oil. In particular, the USA and the European Union have enacted legislation that sets mandatory blending targets and subsidies for agrofuels. Other countries have followed suit or, as in the case of Brazil, had already passed legislation long before. By the end of 2013, 62 countries worldwide had approved agrofuels mandates (Biofuels Digest 2013). The publications and policy documents that prepare and support these policies discuss agrofuels in a technical and managerial way, focusing on issues such as the amount of carbon that each different kind of agrofuel could save, how ‘safeguards’ can be put in place to ensure that agrofuels are ‘sustainable’, or the best land practices that could guarantee that they would contribute to rural development and curtail deforestation (cf. Langeveld and Van Keulen 2014). A political ecology analysis of agrofuels rejects this ‘technical rendering’ and sees agrofuels as a political issue. It is defined by unequal power relations, competing coalitions of actors at different spatial scales, conflicts between these different groups, their competing discourses, the transformation or perpetuation of social power relations (e.g. gender and class, or ethnic relations) and politicization.

For example, a look at the main actors who prepared and lobbied for government policies supporting agrofuels is illuminating in order to understand what the agrofuel project is all about. In early 2005, the EU Commission set up an advisory body called the Biofuels Research Advisory Council (BIOFRAC) to help them develop their agrofuel policy and prepare a corresponding research agenda. In addition to representatives from the agricultural and forestry sectors, and some (technically inclined) academics, this council was made up of people from agribusiness, three automotive companies (Peugot, Volkswagen and Volvo) and three oil companies (Neste Oil, Shell and Total) (CEO 2007). In their recommendation report to the Commission, this group of representatives of large corporations – who are interested in making profits from selling as many cars and as much petrol as possible – propose substantial government subsidies in order to achieve their ‘vision’ that agrofuels should account for 25 per cent of the fuel to be used in the transport sector by 2030 (BIOFRAC 2006).¹ Similarly, in the USA, the agribusiness corporation ADM heavily influenced the passing of legislation that provides billions of dollars’ worth of subsidies to the ethanol sector (see Leopold, Chapter 13, in this volume).

As various contributions in this book show, actor coalitions supporting the agrofuels project, in addition to collaboration between governments and oil, automotive and agribusiness corporations in the North, also include transnational corporations from the South and state actors that perceive agrofuels as part of a developmentalist project (for Brazil, see Backhouse, Chapter 10 and for Colombia, see Marin-Burgos, Chapter 9 in this volume). In India, national agrofuel policies were developed and implemented by coalitions made up of state agencies, private and state-owned oil and energy companies and academics (see Pradhan, Chapter 12 in this volume). Just as illuminating is the fact that environmental organizations such as Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth have not become part of the agrofuels project. Rather, they are increasingly involved in transnational campaign networks that link place-based actors in countries in the Global South affected by agrofuel crop expansion with activist networks opposing pro-agrofuel legislation (Pye 2010).

In this introductory chapter, we chart the contours of the political ecology of agrofuels. In the first part we explore critical themes and theoretical starting-points that constitute such a perspective and frame the contributions that form the core of this collection. We draw on recent theoretical debates in the field of political ecology such as discourse theory, which demands a more serious consideration of the construction of knowledge, and the politics of meaning and representation. We furthermore take up the idea formulated by Michael Watts and Richard Peet (2004: 6) of ‘a broader and more sophisticated sense of the forms of political contention and deeper conception of what is contended’, and who is engaged in these contentions, not only to identify underlying power relations but also to mark the emancipatory potential of processes of politicization around agrofuels. We also take into consideration critical and non-essentialist accounts on the materiality of nature and on the spatiality of agrofuels. This involves taking the biophysical materiality of agrofuel crops seriously in order to get a deeper understanding of how specific natures, understood as ‘historical products of material, representational and symbolic practices’ (Bakker and Bridge 2006: 18), can be productive in the generation of social configurations and the way social relations of power unfold. The latter stresses the need to reflect on how social inequalities and (geo-)political and transnational configurations of power are produced, perpetuated or altered through space. In the second and final part of this introductory chapter, the structure of the book and the main lines of the contributions are briefly outlined.

Politics of representation and competing discourses

The ‘agrofuels project’ (McMichael 2008: 14) is characterized by a confluence of transnational public-private actor coalitions, national legislations, political incentives and specific discursive frames through which it is promoted but also contested. The competing representations of agrofuels can be seen first and foremost in the choice of words to describe the project itself. Proponents use the word ‘biofuel’ to suggest that this is a ‘green’ project and part of a ‘sustainable’ solution to climate change, peak oil and rural poverty. The discursive power of ‘biofuels’ appears in the accelerated increase in crop production applicable to agrofuels at a global scale. As Fairhead et al. (2012: 241) suggest with regard to carbon trading, we claim that there would not be so many flexible possibilities for valuating palm oil or sugar cane without the global discourses that have discerned agrofuels as a ‘flex solution’ to multiple crises, with wide-ranging structural and material implications. So one important argument for a deeper involvement with agrofuels, from a political ecological perspective, relates to the mutuality between the apparently immense power of discourses through which agrofuels inevitably have come into being and their social and biophysical materiality.

As Vogelpohl (Chapter 14, this volume) suggests, in Europe the sustainable biofuel narrative forms part of a ‘neo-liberal “green transformation” meta-discourse’. Part of this is the ongoing hype around the so-called ‘2nd and 3rd generation of biofuels’,² which are represented as promising to overcome the social, ecological and economic ‘limitations’ of the so-called ‘first generation of biofuels’, based on food crops like corn, wheat, rape seed, palm oil or soy, and which have been widely criticized for their adverse impacts on global climate and food security. The main argument in favour of these ‘advanced biofuels’ (Krauss 2014), based on residues, cellulose or algae, is that they would not be in direct competition with food production.

In contrast, critics purposely introduced the term ‘agrofuels’, because it ‘not only reminds us of crop land competition and fuel displacing food’ (McMichael 2010: 621), but analytically it also reflects the dominance of capitalist societal nature relations, i.e. a dominance of strategies to appropriate and represent nature that are guided mainly by capitalism’s social logic of accumulation (Görg 2011). Because the term ‘biofuels’ suggests a cautious and reflexive treatment of nature, promoted as mitigating climate change, the capitalist logic behind them remains invisible. Instead, the term agrofuels alludes to agro-industrial agriculture and its inherent commodification of nature, and to the modernization and industrialization of rural areas with all impacts on social relations and ecological conditions. To talk about agrofuels instead of biofuels is thus both an outcome of empirical observations and an analytical intention.

The discursive power of ‘biofuels’ is not limited to specific spatio-political contexts (the EU) or scales (global scales). Carol Hunsberger (Chapter 8, this volume) argues with reference to Kenya that the crop jatropha has a ‘high discursive flexibility’ that combines a ‘large-scale discourse’ of climate change mitigation and national development with a ‘small-scale discourse about jatropha as a rural development strategy and a source of ‘clean energy for development’. A similar discourse can be seen in India (see Pradhan, Chapter 12 in this volume). Related to the debates that surround the ‘agrofuels project’ in Africa, and more generally, Festus Boamah (2011) points in the same direction, emphasizing that these debates are underpinned by two competing discourses: a powerful sustainable managerial discourse which sees the ‘agrofuels project’ as a way out of climate change and rural poverty and hunger; and a more populist and critical discourse which sees agrofuel investments as a motor for climate change and a threat to local livelihoods and food security. Both discourses are expressed through contextualized narratives (stories) that help to simplify complex issues and express interests.

Being sensitive to the discourses and underlying narratives, knowledge constructions, cultural and social practices and representations through which agrofuels come into being – particularly through discourses of sustainable development, ecological modernization and green economy – helps on the one hand to further understand how the changing relationship between nature and capital, framed as ‘green capitalism’ (Brand 2012), the ‘ “ecological phase” of capital’ (Escobar 1996: 326) or ‘post-Fordist societal nature relations’ (Brand et al. 2008) is articulated by this discourse (see Backhouse in Chapter 10 of this volume). On the other hand, a consideration of the competing discursive practices and related social micro-practices opens new paths to conceptualizing the ‘agrofuels project’ as a highly contested locus of constructing hegemony. The assumption that ‘biofuels’ are a stable end result of a process of socio-ecological transformation of the fuel sector, or a ‘technological fix’ of the climate crisis, can be questioned. It directs our view to the social and discursive micro-practices through which opposition and discontent, but also consent, are articulated and produced. These are embedded in everyday practices and struggles that do not always catch the attention of the media (see Pye in Chapter 11 of this volume). Nevertheless, in order to understand how the normalization of agrofuels works, we need to take these ‘other’ discursive and social practices into account as they can lead to both the emergence of new antagonisms ‘that might trigger a crisis of the dominant rationalities justifying the process of policymaking’ (Gottweis 1998: 264) or the stabilization of existing tendencies. What is contested, fought over and negotiated is thereby an empirical question and depends on the positions and interests of the actors involved (see Marin-Burgos, Chapter 9 in this volume).

Politicization, contention and transnational activism

The discursive power of the win-win narrative (see Vogelpohl in Chapter 14 of this volume) and the economic power embedded within the global networks of agrofuel production are connected to political, regulative power. Powerful political economy networks like the oil and automotive industry formation in the European Union (see Brunnengräber, Chapter 5 in this volume), the transnational agribusiness companies in the United States (see Leopold in Chapter 13 of this volume), the state-corporate alliance in India and Brazil (Pradhan, Chapter 12 and Backhouse, Chapter 10 in this volume) or the ‘palm oil industrial complex’ in Malaysia (Pye 2008), influence government bodies at the national or supra-national scale to enact pro-agrofuel legislation without which the agrofuel industry would hardly be economically viable.

But the hegemony of the agrofuels project is increasingly being challenged by different sets of actor alliances. Land conflicts connected to agrofuel expansion have seen the emergence of place-based actors – small-scale farmers and indigenous groups – who oppose the expropriation of their land and forests in the name of ‘sustainable biofuels’. Activists quickly developed transnational campaign links. In June 2007, European NGOs (non-governmental organizations) launched a ‘Call for an immediate moratorium on EU incentives for agrofuels, EU imports of agrofuels and EU agroenergy monocultures’ (EcoNexus 2007) linking 250 organisations working on issues as varied as global issues of climate justice and neoliberalism, food sovereignty and land rights, conservation or transport policies. Transnational campaigning was particularly strong around the production of agrodiesel from palm oil. European media coverage (including several television programmes) could debunk the ecological credentials of agrofuels by showing that they contributed to rainforest destruction i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 An introduction to the political ecology of agrofuels
• 2 The political ecology of agrofuels: conceptual remarks
• 3 Territory, scale and networks: the spatial dynamics of agrofuels
• 4 The gendered political ecology of agrofuels expansion
• 5 Bridging the gap with agrofuels: energy hunger, energy scarcity and climate change in the European Union
• 6 Agrofuels in the food regime
• 7 Agrofuels and land rights in Africa
• 8 The discursive and material flexibility of Jatropha curcas
• 9 Social-environmental conflicts and agrofuel crops: the case of oil palm expansion in Colombia
• 10 Green grabbing – the case of palm oil expansion in so-called degraded areas in the eastern Brazilian Amazon
• 11 Transnational space and workers’ struggles: reshaping the palm oil industry in Malaysia
• 12 Agrofuel networks: a case study of the regional agrodiesel network in Chhattisgarh (India)
• 13 US agrofuels in times of crisis: food, fuel, finance
• 14 Immunization by neoliberalization: the strange non-death of the win–win narrative in European agrofuel policy
• Index