Is ethanol everybodys fuel?

Near the vestiges of the first sugar factory in Brazil, built in 1877 with a sign in Latin over the entrance saying "Sweet is the Reward of Work," Danuza Gomes Da Silva swings a glinting knife as she makes her way down the length of a field cutting cane.

She bends to slice the sticks of young cane dropped by other workers from the top of a truck. She straightens, again and again. A band of 12 laborers like hers can plant about 10 acres a day. Sugar cane buds easily from the plowed furrows and it grows fast. But the work associated with it is hard.

Danuza, round-faced and soft-eyed, makes between $8 and $13 a day depending on her productivity. Aged 35, she has four young children. Only about 20 percent of the 7.5 million acres planted with sugar cane in Brazil is mechanized. The rest depends on manual labor like hers.

"I don't want to lose my job," she says, a smile on her face, the oversized cleaver in her hand.

Machines that plant and harvest are slowly spreading across the great expanse of Brazilian cane fields. But Danuza's harsh existence is a reminder that behind the global buzz over Brazil's cane-based ethanol production - the 21st century's environment-friendly bio-fuel par excellence - lurk enduring social problems.

Ethanol, renewable and relatively clean, is lovely. The life of the migrant Brazilian rural worker, finite and hot, is not.

Seldom has a country seen an image makeover quite as radical as Brazil's in recent years.

From the not-quite-serious land of samba, slums, soccer and smoking rain forests, it has become the realm of ahead-of-the-curve ethanol work, flex-fuel cars running on any combination of ethanol and gasoline, and a bio-fuel revolution that could deliver the world from ugly, $100-a-barrel oil.

Where the world once saw Pelé and poverty, it now sees a country where 80 percent of new cars run on ethanol or gasoline; all gasoline is sold in a mix that contains close to 25 percent ethanol, and ethanol accounts for over 40 percent of fuel consumption. These numbers make new U.S. targets that might replace about one sixth of gasoline consumption with ethanol by 2020 seem belated and meager.

Brazil, in other words, was busy seeing tomorrow while America viewed it as mired in the past, a place too frivolous to be futuristic.

In fact, both images hold some truth. Brazil has led the way in demonstrating the potential of ethanol, has vast land resources to develop the industry, uses sugar-based ethanol whose productivity is far greater than U.S. corn ethanol being developed at the cost of higher food prices, and has shown the feasibility of a flex-fuel auto fleet.

But a day spent visiting the cane-production facilities of CBAA, a major sugar and ethanol manufacturer, revealed the hardships and difficult social conditions from which these achievements were wrested.

A cane field opposite an area overrun by landless peasants had been burnt in an act of arson. A man searched forlornly for a horse he'd left to feed and then lost in the cane plantations. Outside a makeshift dormitory for migrant workers, men were slumped under clothes hung to dry.

"The social situation is complicated," said Aristoteles Ramos Cardoso, a director. "We're near the city, we need labor, there's no shortage of criminals."

If the vast potential of sugar cane ethanol is to be realized, in Brazil as in poor African countries, its development must come in ordered ways that allow the likes of Danuza and her children to benefit. A new fuel should not carry what has often been oil's curse: the enrichment of a narrow elite.

This will depend on several things: the labor standards adopted by the growing hordes of international investors drawn to ethanol; the opening up of the global trading system to this bio-fuel that many poor tropical countries will be able to produce; and the development of a global traded commodity market in ethanol with established norms. Without such standards, still lacking, development will stall. So will social progress.

"The United States could really generate wealth for those who need it, while freeing itself from oil dependence," said José Pessoa, the chief executive of CBAA. "It should be buying my ethanol rather than imposing tariffs. It should be helping to develop the sugar-cane industry in Africa. This would be the intelligent way and the best for the environment."

America can indeed do its part, not least by freeing up its ethanol and sugar markets to imports. So can Brazil, by seeing a 35-year-old woman in the sun, her children in need of education, and all the myriad people like them, amid the billowing CO2-lite clouds of ethanol euphoria.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/01/09/opinion/edcohen.php

Brazil is not for beginners

The Brazilian journey has often faltered, giving rise to the nostrum that this was a country with a great future condemned to its eternal contemplation. Annual murder figures in the tens of thousands testify to enduring social problems. Tom Jobim, who composed “The Girl From Ipanema,” noted that Brazil is not for beginners.

Still, as Lula has intuited with his astute pragmatism — is anyone else a friend of both Chávez and President Bush? — the tide is flowing this country’s way. Brazil’s future is now. There are five reasons: land, raw materials, energy, the environment and China.

Vastness defines Brazil; the agricultural use of its territory is nowhere near exhaustion. Already the world’s largest exporter of coffee, beef, sugar and orange juice, it is fast increasing exports of other foodstuffs, including chicken ($4.2 billion worth in 2007, up from $2.9 billion in 2006) and soya. More than 220 million acres — an area greater than that currently under cultivation — remain unexploited outside rain forests.

Another fast-rising export is iron ore. China, which is investing heavily here, wants all it can get, just as it wants food (as does India) and energy. Brazil has an abundance of the latter, and could have much more.

Set aside for a moment Brazil’s vast hydroelectric resources and its recent discovery of a huge deepwater oil field off the southeastern coast.

What will count over the long term is its world leadership in plant-based fuels, particularly ethanol from sugar cane, which produces eight times as much energy per hectare as the corn from which most U.S. ethanol is made. Combine that with near limitless farmland, and Brazil’s important future-to-present shift comes into focus.

As Reid writes, “If China was becoming the world’s workshop and India its back office, Brazil is its farm — and potentially its center of environmental services.”

The country’s leadership in nonfossil fuels and the unparalleled biodiversity of its Amazon rain forest make it a natural leader in the 21st-century struggle with global warming.

None of the above would be significant if Brazil were unstable. But like most of the continent, it has become more predictable. China has realized this and is rapidly developing its commercial relations with Brazil and other Latin American countries. The United States has also pursued a range of free-trade agreements, with uneven results.

Over all, however, the continent has been left with a sense of U.S. neglect, sharpened by Bush’s unfulfilled pre-9/11 promise of a new focus that would reflect the presence of more than 40 million Latinos in the U.S. The next president should make looking south a priority, with Brazil as pivot for intensified engagement.

Latin America’s transformation in recent decades has been underestimated. It has been political and economic but also cultural. Deep prejudices against indigenous, mestizo and mulatto populations have been confronted and, if not defeated, undermined. In historical terms, this has been a time of empowerment for the dark-skinned.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/opinion/06cohen.html

Royal support for rainforest effort

Britain's Prince Charles has offered to team up with Norway in projects to save forests around the world.

The Prince of Wales's offer to Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg followed Norway's announcement earlier this month that it aimed to provide about NOK 3 billion (USD 541.2 million) per year to prevent deforestation in developing countries.

Charles, who has said saving the world's rainforests is key to combating global warming, sent a letter to Stoltenberg suggesting that his Rainforests Project send representatives to Norway to discuss ways to cooperate, a spokesman at the prime minister's office said.

Stoltenberg said Norway would be glad to receive them and is willing to work with all who want to put systems and regulations in place to halt deforestation.

Norway has said that fighting deforestation is a quick and low-cost way to achieve cuts in greenhouse gas emissions blamed by scientists for global warming, in addition to maintaining biodiversity and securing people's livelihoods.

Norway has said that commitments to reduce emissions from deforestation in developing nations should be included in a global climate change regime from 2012 and that it will work to develop funding and certification systems to promote the effort.

http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article2168603.ece

Brazil cracks down on illegal soy, cattle production in the Amazon

The Brazilian government launched a new initiative to slow deforestation in the Amazon, setting the stage for the country to potentially earn billions from carbon trading schemes set in motion two weeks ago at the U.N. climate meeting in Bali.

Last Friday Brazil announced a ban on the sale of farm products from illegally deforested areas in the Amazon in an attempt to slow deforestation and forest fires that have increased in recent months due to surging commodity prices fueled by American corn ethanol subsidies and rising demand from China and other emerging markets for livestock feed. The presidential decree imposes fines and threatens credit access to landowners for buying or trading soy, beef, and other products produced on illegally deforested lands, according to Reuters.

To support the effort, Brazil said it will create a landholder registry and send 700 more federal police to the region, parts of which have seen violent disputes over land. Land owners who fail to register for the new program will no longer be eligible for government loans and other benefits, according to the Associated Press (AP).

"This registry will permit us to create a common database which will permit us to identify the rural areas which require action against deforestation," the AP quoted Environment Minister Marina Silva as saying at a news conference in Brasilia.

Brazil has some of the toughest environmental regulations in the world — by law 80 percent of a landowner's property must be left forested — but they are haphazardly enforced in the Amazon. A slow approvals process--for permits ranging from scientific research to development--has been blamed for fueling endemic corruption and a "Wild West" mentality in the region.

The reasons for land-clearing in the Amazon are compelling: cheap land, low labor costs, and booming demand for commodities. These factors, combined with an improved variety of soybean and financial stability, have helped Brazil become an agricultural superpower — the world’s largest exporter of beef, cotton, and sugar, among other products — in less than a generation. Amazon landowners have seen their land values double every 4-5 years in areas that just a decade ago were pristine rainforests.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell by more than 60 percent between 2004 and 2007.

Given this landscape some believe the only way to address deforestation is through market mechanisms, like those proposed by the Brazilian government Friday.

John Cain Carter, founder of Aliança da Terra, a pioneering conservation organization working in Mato Grosso in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon's agricultural frontier, says that by giving producers incentives to reduce their impact on the forest, the market can succeed where traditional conservation efforts have failed.

"Aliança da Terra is based on the concept of market acceptance for sustainable agricultural production in the Brazilian Amazon. We're presently focused on beef, which is the largest driver of deforestation in the Amazon, though we're also working with other products including soy," Carter told mongabay.com. "We're setting up an accrediting mechanism that will help responsible landowners gain access to markets and get the best price for their products... The landowners like our system because they have a say in the creation of standards and a vested interest in making it economically viable."

New source of funding for rainforest conservation

Brazil's efforts to reduce deforestation could pay off in the international carbon trading market. December 14th, delegates at the U.N. COP-13 climate meeting in Bali, Indonesia agreed to support Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) mechanisms for fighting climate change. By some estimates the scheme could send tropical countries tens of billions of dollars per year for forest conservation efforts.

http://news.mongabay.com/2007/1224-brazil.html

Good and Evil at the Center of the Earth: A Quechua Christmas Carol

by Greg Palast / December 26th, 2007

[Quito] I don’t know what the hell seized me. In the middle of an hour-long interview with the President of Ecuador, I asked him about his father.

I’m not Barbara Walters. It’s not the kind of question I ask.

He hesitated. Then said, “My father was unemployed.”

He paused. Then added, “He took a little drugs to the States… This is called in Spanish a mula [mule]. He passed four years in the States — in a jail.”

He continued. “I’d never talked about my father before.”

Apparently he hadn’t. His staff stood stone silent, eyes widened.

Correa’s dad took that frightening chance in the 1960s, a time when his family, like almost all families in Ecuador, was destitute. Ecuador was the original “banana republic” — and the price of bananas had hit the floor. A million desperate Ecuadorans, probably a tenth of the entire adult population, fled to the USA anyway they could.

“My mother told us he was working in the States.”

His father, released from prison, was deported back to Ecuador. Humiliated, poor, broken, his father, I learned later, committed suicide.

At the end of our formal interview, through a doorway surrounded by paintings of the pale plutocrats who once ruled this difficult land, he took me into his own Oval Office. I asked him about an odd-looking framed note he had on the wall. It was, he said, from his daughter and her grade school class at Christmas time. He translated for me.

“We are writing to remind you that in Ecuador there are a lot of very poor children in the streets and we ask you please to help these children who are cold almost every night.”

It was kind of corny. And kind of sweet. A smart display for a politician.

Or maybe there was something else to it.

Correa is one of the first dark-skinned men to win election to this Quechua and mixed-race nation. Certainly, one of the first from the streets. He’d won a surprise victory over the richest man in Ecuador, the owner of the biggest banana plantation.

Doctor Correa, I should say, with a Ph.D in economics earned in Europe. Professor Correa as he is officially called — who, until not long ago, taught at the University of Illinois.

And Professor Doctor Correa is one tough character. He told George Bush to take the US military base and stick it where the equatorial sun don’t shine. He told the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which held Ecuador’s finances by the throat, to go to hell. He ripped up the “agreements” which his predecessors had signed at financial gun point. He told the Miami bond vultures that were charging Ecuador usurious interest, to eat their bonds. He said ‘We are not going to pay off this debt with the hunger of our people. ” Food first, interest later. Much later. And he meant it.

It was a stunning performance. I’d met two years ago with his predecessor, President Alfredo Palacio, a man of good heart, who told me, looking at the secret IMF agreements I showed him, “We cannot pay this level of debt. If we do, we are DEAD. And if we are dead, how can we pay?” Palacio told me that he would explain this to George Bush and Condoleezza Rice and the World Bank, then headed by Paul Wolfowitz. He was sure they would understand. They didn’t. They cut off Ecuador at the knees.

But Ecuador didn’t fall to the floor. Correa, then Economics Minister, secretly went to Hugo Chavez Venezuela’s president and obtained emergency financing. Ecuador survived.

And thrived. But Correa was not done.

Elected President, one of his first acts was to establish a fund for the Ecuadoran refugees in America — to give them loans to return to Ecuador with a little cash and lot of dignity. And there were other dragons to slay. He and Palacio kicked US oil giant Occidental Petroleum out of the country.

Correa STILL wasn’t done.

I’d returned from a very wet visit to the rainforest — by canoe to a Cofan Indian village in the Amazon where there was an epidemic of childhood cancers. The indigenous folk related this to the hundreds of open pits of oil sludge left to them by Texaco Oil, now part of Chevron, and its partners. I met the Cofan’s chief. His three year old son swam in what appeared to be contaminated water then came out vomiting blood and died.

Correa had gone there too, to the rainforest, though probably in something sturdier than a canoe. And President Correa announced that the company that left these filthy pits would pay to clean them up.

But it’s not just any company he was challenging. Chevron’s largest oil tanker was named after a long-serving member of its Board of Directors, the Condoleezza. Our Secretary of State.

The Cofan have sued Condi’s corporation, demanding the oil company clean up the crap it left in the jungle. The cost would be roughly $12 billion. Correa won’t comment on the suit itself, a private legal action. But if there’s a verdict in favor of Ecuador’s citizens, Correa told me, he will make sure Chevron pays up.

Is he kidding? No one has ever made an oil company pay for their slop. Even in the USA, the Exxon Valdez case drags on to its 18th year. Correa is not deterred.

He told me he would create an international tribunal to collect, if necessary. In retaliation, he could hold up payments to US companies who sue Ecuador in US courts.

This is hard core. No one — NO ONE — has made such a threat to Bush and Big Oil and lived to carry it out.

And, in an office tower looking down on Quito, the lawyers for Chevron were not amused. I met with them.

“And it’s the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?” Rodrigo Perez, Texaco’s top lawyer in Ecuador was chuckling over the legal difficulties the Indians would have in proving their case that Chevron-Texaco caused their kids’ deaths. “If there is somebody with cancer there, [the Cofan parents] must prove [the deaths were] caused by crude or by petroleum industry. And, second, they have to prove that it is OUR crude — which is absolutely impossible.” He laughed again. You have to see this on film to believe it.

The oil company lawyer added, “No one has ever proved scientifically the connection between cancer and crude oil.” Really? You could swim in the stuff and you’d be just fine.

The Cofan had heard this before. When Chevron’s Texaco unit came to their land the the oil men said they could rub the crude oil on their arms and it would cure their ailments. Now Condi’s men had told me that crude oil doesn’t cause cancer. But maybe they are right. I’m no expert. So I called one. Robert F Kennedy Jr., professor of Environmental Law at Pace University, told me that elements of crude oil production — benzene, toluene, and xylene, “are well-known carcinogens.” Kennedy told me he’s seen Chevron-Texaco’s ugly open pits in the Amazon and said that this toxic dumping would mean jail time in the USA.

But it wasn’t as much what the Chevron-Texaco lawyers said that shook me. It was the way they said it. Childhood cancer answered with a chuckle. The Chevron lawyer, a wealthy guy, Jaime Varela, with a blond bouffant hairdo, in the kind of yellow chinos you’d see on country club links, was beside himself with delight at the impossibility of the legal hurdles the Cofan would face. Especially this one: Chevron had pulled all its assets out of Ecuador. The Indians could win, but they wouldn’t get a dime. “What about the chairs in this office?” I asked. Couldn’t the Cofan at least get those? “No,” they laughed, the chairs were held in the name of the law firm.

Well, now they might not be laughing. Correa’s threat to use the power of his Presidency to protect the Indians, should they win, is a shocker. No one could have expected that. And Correa, no fool, knows that confronting Chevron means confronting the full power of the Bush Administration. But to this President, it’s all about justice, fairness. “You [Americans] wouldn’t do this to your own people,” he told me. Oh yes we would, I was thinking to myself, remembering Alaska’s Natives.

Correa’s not unique. He’s the latest of a new breed in Latin America. Lula, President of Brazil, Evo Morales, the first Indian ever elected President of Bolivia, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. All “Leftists,” as the press tells us. But all have something else in common: they are dark-skinned working-class or poor kids who found themselves leaders of nations of dark-skinned people who had forever been ruled by an elite of bouffant blonds.

When I was in Venezuela, the leaders of the old order liked to refer to Chavez as, “the monkey.” Chavez told me proudly, “I am negro e indio” — Black and Indian, like most Venezuelans. Chavez, as a kid rising in the ranks of the blond-controlled armed forces, undoubtedly had to endure many jeers of “monkey.” Now, all over Latin America, the “monkeys” are in charge.

And they are unlocking the economic cages.

Maybe the mood will drift north. Far above the equator, a nation is ruled by a blond oil company executive. He never made much in oil - but every time he lost his money or his investors’ money, his daddy, another oil man, would give him another oil well. And when, as a rich young man out of Philips Andover Academy, the wayward youth tooted a little blow off the bar, daddy took care of that too. Maybe young George got his powder from some guy up from Ecuador.

I know this is an incredibly simple story. Indians in white hats with their dead kids and oil millionaires in black hats laughing at kiddy cancer and playing musical chairs with oil assets.

But maybe it’s just that simple. Maybe in this world there really is Good and Evil.

Maybe Santa will sort it out for us, tell us who’s been good and who’s been bad. Maybe Lawyer Yellow Pants will wake up on Christmas Eve staring at the ghost of Christmas Future and promise to get the oil sludge out of the Cofan’s drinking water.

Or maybe we’ll have to figure it out ourselves. When I met Chief Emergildo, I was reminded of an evening years back, when I was way the hell in the middle of nowhere in the Prince William Sound, Alaska, in the Chugach Native village of Chenega. I was investigating the damage done by Exxon’s oil. There was oil sludge all over Chenega’s beaches. It was March 1991, and I was in the home of village elder Paul Kompkoff on the island’s shore, watching CNN. We stared in silence as “smart” bombs exploded in Baghdad and Basra.

Then Paul said to me, in that slow, quiet way he had, “Well, I guess we’re all Natives now.”

Well, maybe we are. But we don’t have to be, do we?

Maybe we can take some guidance from this tiny nation at the center of the earth. I listened back through my talk with President Correa. And I can assure his daughter that she didn’t have to worry that her dad would forget about “the poor children who are cold” on the streets of Quito.

Because the Professor Doctor is still one of them.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/12/good-and-evil-at-the-center-of-the-earth-a-quechua-christmas-carol/

Food, Forests and Fuel

2007 will see more than 10,000 representatives of government and civil society gather in Bali for a meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This is the international treaty under which the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated. The Protocol expires in 2012, and Bali is supposed to begin negotiations on a post-Kyoto framework.

In 2007, no one can deny that man-made climate change is taking place. However, the commitment to mitigate and help the vulnerable to adapt does not match the recognition of the disaster.

Mitigation requires material changes in production and consumption patterns. Globalization has pushed production and consumption worldwide to higher carbon dioxide emissions. WTO rules of trade liberalization are in effect rules that force countries on a high emissions pathway.

Similarly, World Bank lending for super highways and thermal power plants, industrial agriculture and corporate retail coerces countries to emit more greenhouse gases. And giant corporations such as Cargill and Walmart carry major responsibility in destroying local, sustainable economies and pushing society after society into dependence on an ecologically destructive global economy.

Cargill is an important player in spreading soya cultivation in the Amazon, and palm oil plantations in the rainforest of Indonesia thus increasing emissions both by the burning of forests and destruction of the massive carbon sink in rainforests and peat lands. And Walmart’s model of long-distance centralized trade is a recipe for increasing the carbon dioxide burden in the atmosphere.

The first step in mitigation requires a focus on real actions of real actors. Real actions are actions such as a shift away from ecological farming and local food systems. Real actors include global agribusiness, the WTO, the World Bank. Real actions involve destruction of rural economies with low emission to urban sprawl designed and planned by builders and construction companies. Real actions involve destruction of sustainable transport systems based on renewable energy and public transport to private automobiles. Real actors pushing this transition to non-sustainability in mobility are the oil companies and automobile corporations.

Kyoto totally avoided the material challenge of stopping activities that lead to higher emissions and the political challenge of regulation of the polluters and making the polluters pay in accordance with principles adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio. Instead, Kyoto put in place the mechanism of emissions trading which in effect rewarded the polluters by assigning them rights to the atmosphere and trading in these rights to pollute.

Today, the emissions trading market has reached $ 30 billion and is expected to go up to $ 1 trillion. Carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase, while profits from ‘hot air’ also increase. I call it ‘hot air’ both because it is literally hot air leading to global warming and because it is metaphorically hot air, based on the fictitious economy of finance which has overtaken the real economy, both in size and in our perception.

A casino economy has allowed corporations and their owners to multiply their wealth without limit, and without any relationship to the real world. Yet this hungry money then seeks to own the real resources of people – the land and the forests, the farms and the food, and turn them into cash. Unless we return to the real world, we will not find the solutions that will help mitigate climate change.

Another false solution to climate change is the promotion of biofuels based on corn and soya, palmoil and jatropha.

Biofuels, fuels from biomass, continue to be the most important energy source for the poor in the world. The ecological biodiverse farm is not just a source of food; it is a source of energy. Energy for cooking the food comes from the inedible biomass like cow dung cakes, stalks of millets and pulses, agro-forestry species on village wood lots. Managed sustainably, village commons have been a source of decentralized energy for centuries.

Industrial biofuels are not the fuels of the poor; they are the foods of the poor, transformed into heat, electricity, and transport. Liquid biofuels, in particular ethanol and bio-diesel, are one of the fastest growing sectors of production, driven by the search of alternatives to fossil fuels both to avoid the catastrophe of peak oil and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. President Bush is trying to pass legislation to require the use of 35 billion gallons of biofuels by 2017. M. Alexander of the Sustainable Development Department of FAO has stated: ‘The gradual move away from oil has begun. Over the next 15 to 20 years we may see biofuels providing a full 25 per cent of the world’s energy needs’.

Global production of biofuels alone has doubled in the last five years and will likely double again in the next four. Among countries that have enacted a new pro-biofuel policy in recent years are Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Columbia, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Malawi, Malaysia, Mexico, Mozambique, the Philippines, Senegal, South Africa, Thailand and Zambia.

There are two types of industrial biofuels – ethanol and biodiesel. Ethanol can be produced from products rich in saccharose such as sugarcane and molasses, substances rich in starch such as maize, barley and wheat. Ethanol is blended with petrol. Biodiesel is produced from vegetable only such as palm oil, soya oil, and rapeseed oil. Biodiesel is blended with diesel.

Representatives of organizations and social movements from Brazil, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Columbia, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, in a declaration entitled ‘Full Tanks at the Cost of Empty Stomachs’, wrote ‘The current model of production of bio-energy is sustained by the same elements that have always caused the oppression of our people’s appropriation of territory, of natural resources, and the labor force.’

And Fidel Castro, in an article entitled ‘Food as an Imperial Weapon: Biofuels and Global Hunger’ has said that, ‘More than three billion people are being condemned to a premature death from hunger and thirst’.

The biofuel sector worldwide has grown rapidly. The United States and Brazil have established ethanol industries and the European Union is also fast catching up to explore the potential market. Governments all over the world are encouraging biofuel production with favorable policies. The United States are pushing the other Third World nations to go in for biofuel production so that their energy needs get met at the expense of plundering others’ resources.

Inevitably this massive increase in the demand for grains is going to come at the expense of the satisfaction of human needs, with poor people priced out of the food market. On February 28, the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement released a statement noting that ‘the expansion of the production of biofuels aggravates hunger in the world. We cannot maintain our tanks full while stomachs go empty’.

The diversion of food for fuel has already increased the price of corn and soya. There have been riots in Mexico because of the price rise of tortillas. And this is just the beginning. Imagine the land needed for providing 25% of the oil from food.

One ton of corn produces 413 liters of ethanol. 35 million gallons of ethanol requires 320 million tons of corn. The US produced 280.2 million tons of corn in 2005. As a result of NAFTA, the U.S. made Mexico dependent on U.S. corn, and destroyed the small farms of Mexico. This was in fact the basis of the Zapatista uprising. As a result of corn being diverted to biofuels, prices of corn have increased in Mexico.

Industrial biofuels are being promoted as a source of renewable energy and as a means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, there are two ecological reasons why converting crops like soya, corn and palm oil into liquid fuels can actually aggravate climate chaos and the CO2 burden.

Firstly, deforestation caused by expanding soya plantations and palm oil plantations is leading to increased CO2 emissions. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 1.6 billion tons or 25 to 30 per cent of the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere each year comes from deforestation. By 2022, biofuel plantations could destroy 98% of Indonesia’s rainforests.

According to Wetlands International, the destruction of Southeast Asian land for palm oil plantations is contributing to 8% of global CO2 emissions. According to Delft Hydraulics, every ton of palm oil results in 30 tonof carbon dioxide emissions or 10 times as much as petroleum producers. However, this additional burden on the atmosphere is treated as a clean development mechanism in the Kyoto Protocol for reducing emissions. Biofuels are thus contributing to the same global warming that they are supposed to reduce. (World Rainforest Bulletin No.112, Nov 2006, Page 22)

Further, the conversion of biomass to liquid fuel uses more fossil fuels than it substitutes.

One gallon of ethanol production requires 28,000 kcal. This provides 19,400 kcal of energy. Thus the energy efficiency is -- 43%.

The U.S. will use 20% of its corn to produce 5 billion gallons of ethanol which will substitute 1% of oil use. If 100% of corn was used, only 7% of the total oil would be substituted. This is clearly not a solution either to peak oil or climate chaos. (David Pimental at IFG conference on ‘The Triple Crisis’, London, Feb 23-25 2007)

And it is a source of other crisis. 1700 gallons of water are used to produce a gallon of ethanol. Corn uses more nitrogen fertilizer, more insecticides, more herbicides than any other crop.

These false solutions will increase the climate crisis while aggravating and deepening inequality, hunger and poverty. Real solutions exist which can mitigate climate change while reducing hunger and poverty.

According to the Stern Report, agriculture accounts for 14% emissions, land use (referring largely to deforestation) accounts for 18%, and transport accounts for 14%. The increasing transport of fresh food, which could be grown locally, is part of these 14% emissions.

Not all agricultural systems however contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. Industrial chemical agriculture, also called the Green Revolution when introduced in Third World countries, is the major source of three greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and methane.

Carbon dioxide is emitted from using fossil fuels for machines and pumping of ground water, and the production of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Chemical fertilizers also emit nitrogen oxygen, which is 300 times more lethal than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. And grain fed factory farming is a major source of methane.

Studies indicate that a shift from grain fed to predominantly grass fed organic diet could reduce methane emission from livestock by up to 50%.

Ecological, organic agriculture reduces emissions both by reducing dependence on fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers and intensive feed, as well as absorbing more carbon in the soil. Our studies show an increase of carbon sequestration of up to 200% in biodiverse organic systems.

When ‘ecological and organic’ is combined with ‘direct and local’, emissions are further reduced by reducing energy use for ‘food miles’, packaging and refrigeration of food. And local food systems will reduce the pressure to expand agriculture in the rainforests of Brazil and Indonesia.

We could, with a timely transition reduce emissions, increase food security and food quality and improve the resilience of rural communities to deal with the impact of climate change. The transition from the industrial globalized food system being imposed by WTO, the World Bank and Global Agribusinesses to ecological and local food systems is both a mitigation and adaptation strategy. It protects the poor and it protects the planet.

The post-Kyoto framework must include ecological agriculture as a climate solution.

http://sloweb.slowfood.com/sloweb/eng/dettaglio.lasso?cod=D4ABF2071df53222E5lILp591810

Brazil requiring two per cent biodiesel content in all diesel fuel

Brazil said Friday that starting Jan. 1 it will require all diesel oil to contain two per cent biodiesel in an effort to grow the market for the renewable, clean-burning fuel.

"The great advantage is for the country to have an alternative fuel that helps in the reduction of carbon gas emissions, that reduces pollution," Mines and Energy Minister Nelson Hubner said at a press conference in Brasilia, the country's capital.

All filling stations will be required to offer diesel containing two per cent vegetable oil starting Tuesday, Huber said. He expressed confidence there will be enough biodiesel available to meet the demand, but acknowledged some potential delivery problems at first in remote areas of the country.

Some 800 million litres of biodiesel will be needed annually to meet the two per cent demand, but Brazil already has the capacity to produce more than three times that amount, he said.

Fuel distributors said they will be prepared.

"It's a bit of a challenge. The distributors have spent about 100 million reals to be able to store the biodiesel, but everything is ready and we have verified there is enough biodiesel supply to meet the demand," Alisio Mendes Vaz, executive vice-president of National Union of Fuel and Lubricant Distribution Companies, said in a telephone interview.

Biodiesel is produced in Brazil from soy beans, castor seeds, sunflower seeds and palm fruits, but Vaz said the vast bulk of Brazil's available biodiesel came from soybeans.

Brazil is a world leader in alternative fuels, poised to edge out the United States as the world's No. 1 ethanol producer. As production of soybean-based biodiesel ramps up, Brazil plans to slowly increase the percentage of the biodiesel blend to 5 per cent by 2013.

Environmentalists have praised biodiesel as a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels, but increased production has stirred concerns that it could speed rainforest deforestation as soy bean growers advance into the Amazon.

http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5g717c7PFplRYZBdEkNbtI0eW1Mvw

Hostages Release Goes Far Beyond Personal Ordeal

COLOMBIA: Hostages Release Goes Far Beyond Personal Ordeal
Analysis by Ana Carrigan

LONDON, Dec 28 (IPS) - The long ordeal of two of the 45 hostages held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), whose release was promised by the guerrilla leadership on Dec. 18, appears at long last to be coming to an end.

Weather permitting, former congresswoman Consuelo González, and Clara Rojas, the former running-mate of ex-presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, together with Clara's three-year-old son Emmanuel -- the product of a relationship with a FARC guerrilla -- should be safely reunited with their families in Caracas by Saturday evening.

That at least is what all those now in Caracas, waiting as Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez launched his elaborate plan Friday to fly helicopters and planes into Colombia to pick up the hostages in the jungle, are hoping.

Yet on Thursday night, the Colombian government, apparently without prior warning to the Venezuelan government, posted a communiqué on the website of the Colombian president’s office unilaterally setting a deadline for the complex rescue operation.

The statement said that Colombia's permission for Venezuelan aircraft to operate within Colombian airspace was set to expire at 1900 local time on Sunday.

But on Friday, Colombian President Álvaro Uribe reportedly received a call from his counterpart in France, Nicolas Sarkozy. Apparently, the deadline had been lifted by Friday afternoon.

Underlying this announcement, it is not hard to sense the frustration of the Colombian government, which has been diplomatically isolated by the enthusiastic international support for Chávez' successful efforts to secure the release of at least a few of the hostages.

Nor is it difficult to imagine the dismay of those Colombian generals who apparently believe they can, and are, winning the country’s four-decade civil war against the FARC, and who this week have found themselves suddenly outwitted, as their enemy has emerged into the international spotlight, escaping the political and diplomatic isolation in which the government's refusal to negotiate has succeeded in keeping them boxed in for the last six years.

Meanwhile, it can only be upsetting for the Colombian high command to find that in the midst of a major offensive in the rainforest war zone, they must obey orders to pull back their forces so as to create a de facto demilitarised area without any conditions attached.

Among those waiting in Caracas for the release of the hostages are the families of González and Rojas, who have both been held in guerrilla camps in the jungle for six years, and politicians and diplomatic representatives of five Latin American countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba and Ecuador) and two European countries (France and Switzerland), whose governments have come on board to support Chávez' efforts and serve as international "guarantors" of the handover of the hostages by the FARC.

In addition, there is a delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), whose participation as neutral intermediaries has been requested by the Colombian and Venezuelan governments and by the FARC, and reporters from all over the world, for whom Chávez has organised a flight to Colombia to report live on the release of the hostages.

But when this operation has run its course, what comes next? There are rumours a-plenty that the FARC may release one of the three U.S. hostages -- military contractors captured while working for the U.S.-financed Plan Colombia counterinsurgency and anti-drug strategy -- who is reportedly in poor health.

The FARC wants U.S. politicians to join the international effort to find solutions, not only to the large and complex issues standing in the way of a humanitarian exchange of all of the hostages for imprisoned insurgents, but also to engage U.S. policy-makers in longer term efforts to tackle issues like the drug trade and rural development, and eventual peace talks.

On Thursday, Brazilian delegate Marco Aurelio García, a seasoned diplomat and the personal envoy of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, spoke briefly to a radio reporter on his arrival in Caracas. "We have firm hopes," he said, "that this will be the first step in a long process, aimed first at resolving the hostage crisis and secondly at finding a peaceful solution to the conflict that has gripped Colombia for more than 40 years."

At the end of the day, what is happening this weekend in Colombia and Venezuela is about more than the release of three hostages. What is happening right now, if all goes well, has the potential to dramatically alter the future of war and peace in Colombia.

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40630

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