“You Have a Friend in Bioenergy”: Sustainability, Advanced Biofuels, Rural Incomes and the Developing World

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ...With respect to energy security, consider this: it is estimated that ten percent of all US military casualties come from the delivery of fuel. Even if it were true that none of the deployments of US troops had anything to do with the protection of Middle Eastern oil fields and the sea lanes that connect the West to them — even if it were untrue that the cost of fuel in forward military areas reaches $418 per gallon — the cost of delivering military fossil fuels is far too high in terms of human life.

The casualties are a direct outcome of the distance between oil fields and forward military areas. Biofuels have the potential to shorten supply lines, reduce costs, and save lives. Not to mention the reduction in the strategic value of certain bloody corridors the West feels obligated to defend, or clear, or secure.

So we have good reason, on energy security grounds, to explore the most effective ways to develop sustainable biofuels.

...We have heard concerns that the expansion of the biofuels industry in the Philippines would threaten the supply of cassava to food markets. Cassava, as we all know, is a vital staple food — not only in the Philippines but around the world.

But let us also remember that no one in the world eats raw cassava. Eaten raw, it forms a cyanide inside the body and causes severe sickness, and even death. It takes energy to turn cassava the crop into cassava the food. Plenty of energy. Food is what you have after you have applied energy to crops.

In many countries, energy is taken from forest biomass, converted into sticks to fuel a three-stone fire, and the forests are disappearing in Africa in ways that threaten more than long-term carbon counts. In Africa, wood collection is primarily the work of women and girls, and violence against women will increase when they have to roam farther from the village to find fuel for the cooking fire.

So let us not fall into the discussion of food versus fuel, because it is a false choice. We should instead be thinking in terms of food and fuel. They are interlinked in the village, and through fertilizers and tractor fuels, and through the global distribution system of food. We need both fuel crops and food crops, and badly, and now.

...We heard this week about the use of camelina as a feedstock for aviation biofuels — with companies like United Airlines, American, Delta, British Airways, Lufthansa, and the FAA and Defense Energy Service Center joining us this week to detail their interest in new fuel sources. Wheat growers in the US and Canadian plains are learning that camelina, used in rotation with wheat, can not only provide added income from the camelina crop, but can result in higher wheat yields for the food markets.

...We hear still less about the devastating impact on small farmers in the developing world when exhausted land is dumped onto the pasture market, driving down land values and driving former farmers into the cities to become members of the new, global refugee class.

...To the hungry — and to the dispossessed farmers around the world whose land cannot yield the income necessary to keep them on the land — we owe a higher focus. We owe them an unrelating commitment to producing fuel to light their fires, power their farm vehicles, and given them products to raise their incomes.

The food crisis is not a crisis over a shortage of food — the world today produces more food per capita than at any time in its known history. It is a crisis of income.

Higher incomes produce smaller families, and smaller families consume less food, and can invest in better home and farm practices to reduce the carbon footprint. Though wealthy Westerners may not realize it, our world is still overwhelmingly a rural one, and no crisis of income can be resolved without addressing incomes on the farm. No crisis of stability can be resolved, no population explosion addressed, no real carbon solution deployed — until we have addressed the fundamental issue of rural income, which is also a key to human dignity. READ MORE