Biofuel's Big Bean
(Page 2 of 3)
Utne Reader July / August 2007 Issue
by April Howard and Benjamin Dangl, In These Times
In June 2006, the chief executive of Cargill told the New York Times that the biofuel industry is a "gold rush." Transnational seed and agrochemical companies such as Monsanto, Pioneer, Syngenta, DuPont, Archer Daniels Midland, and Bunge manage the industry. International financial institutions and development banks promote and bankroll the export of monoculture crops. The World Trade Organization grants increased subsidies to these agribusinesses and tax credits to refiners involved in biofuel production.
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The cheap, unregulated land and labor available in places like Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina make the economic deal even sweeter. According to the Ecologist (March 2007), biotech businesses look to set up shop in countries where environmental regulations are slack.
Argentina has recently created corporate incentives to expand soy cultivation for biodiesel. And worldwide subsidies to the biofuel industry are now between $5.5 billion and $7.3 billion annually, according to a Global Subsidies Initiative (GSI) report published in October 2006. "Many of these subsidies are poorly coordinated and targeted," says GSI director Simon Upton. "The potential for waste on a grand scale and some spectacularly perverse environmental outcomes is large."
The last agricultural census in Paraguay was taken in 1991, making guesswork of how much deforested land is used to plant soy. Of the Interior Atlantic Forest, however, which once covered 300 million acres, including 85 percent of eastern Paraguay and parts of Argentina and Brazil, even the most liberal estimates state that no more than 13 percent remains. According to the Nature Conservancy, Paraguay has one of the "largest" remnants of original forest--a mere 3.2 million acres.
An acre of forested land absorbs almost twice as much CO2 as land used to grow biofuel crops, thereby cancelling out any climate advantage advertised by biofuel production. Soy cultivation dumps more than 24 million liters of agrochemicals in Paraguay every year. They include Paraquat, which has no antidote if ingested; Metamidofos, which has reduced sperm count in exposed males; and Endosulfan, which causes birth defects in the infants of repeatedly exposed mothers. The Paraguayans we spoke with didn't use the terms pesticide or herbicide; they called the chemicals venenos, venoms or poisons.