NB :: Forecast calculation of ‘carbon savings’ precedes the Crutzen paper
that shows corn ethanol and oilseed rape produce more greenhouse gas than
equivalent fossil fuel
(http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/biofuelwatch/message/1063).

With Crutzen’s data, the monetary cost of ’per tonne of carbon saved’ is
becomes either very high and/or pretty meaningless.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,,-6984875,00.html

Biofuels policy costs double

Press Association
Wednesday October 10, 2007 4:58 AM

The estimated cost to taxpayers of a flagship Government policy for
promoting biofuels has almost doubled while the forecast carbon savings it
will deliver have been cut, it has emerged.

The predicted cost of the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) has
risen by 87% from £203 to £380 per tonne of carbon emissions saved.

Meanwhile, estimated carbon savings are down from one million tonnes a year
to 700,000-800,000 tonnes.

The RTFO is intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the transport
industry by increasing use of biofuels.

Read more at : http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,,-6984875,00.html

Copyright (c) Press Association Ltd. 2007

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2007/09/27/stora_enso_sells_brazilia
n_assets/

Stora Enso sells Brazilian assets

September 27, 2007

NEW YORK --Paper, packaging and forest products producer Stora
<http://boston.stockgroup.com/sn_overview.asp?symbol=SEO> Enso said
Thursday it has agreed to sell some of its Brazilian unit's operations to
Arauco, a forest industries company, for $208 million.

Stora Enso's Brazilian unit, Stora Enso Arapoti, will sell its sawmill, an
80 percent stake in its forest holding company and a 20 percent stake in its
coated paper mill to Arauco.

The sale will have no material impact on Stora Enso's third-quarter
operating profit, the company said in a statement.

The joint operations could lead to future joint projects in Latin America,
Stora Enso said.

The deal is expected to close by the end of October.

Shares of Helsinki, Finland-based Stora Enso fell 1 cent to $19.24 in midday
trading.

More at :
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2007/09/27/stora_enso_sells_brazilia
n_assets/

http://www.workers.org/2007/world/biofuels-1018/

Biofuels and world hunger

By G. Dunkel

Published Oct 12, 2007 11:41 PM

While obesity is a major health problem in the United States, and a growing
problem in other developed countries, 854 million people throughout the
world are hungry, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agricultural
Organization. The FAO defines hunger as a person not getting enough food
every day to sustain themselves.

Ten million children under the age of 5 die each year from hunger, according
to an article in the Lancet, a major medical journal. Three billion people
out of the 6 billion in the world face premature death due to lack of
nutrition or potable water, according to the FAO; 2.4 billion people have to
cook with wood or other biological products and 1.6 billion have no access
to electricity.

In the past year, the problem of hunger—especially in the least developed
areas of the world like sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia—has grown sharper
because the price of corn has shot up, more than doubling in the past 12
months and the price of wheat has reached a ten-year high. The world has
less than 60 days of corn stockpiled, the lowest level in decades, and the
stock of wheat is at a 25-year low.

The reason for this increase is the policy recently adopted by the Bush
administration to produce a major amount of ethanol from corn. Ethanol can
be used as a substitute for fuels produced from petroleum.

In the developed countries, not much corn is consumed directly. Instead, it
is used as feed to produce milk and dairy products, eggs, meat (beef,
chicken, pork), cereals, peanut butter, soft drinks and snacks.

But in countries like Mexico and South Africa, with a significant level of
economic development—certainly not at the level of the U.S. or Western
Europe, but nonetheless substantial—corn meal is a staple.

Mexico came close to food rebellions earlier this year, when the price of
corn meal rose by 400 percent. Thousands of angry workers came out in the
streets all over the country, waving corncobs. These workers were used to
spending up to a third of their income on corn meal to make tortillas and
were even used to fluctuations in corn prices—but a 400 percent increase was
catastrophic.

Mexico is the fourth-largest producer of corn in the world and under NAFTA
it can import supposedly cheap corn from the U.S. Mexico’s President Felipe
Calderón cobbled together a “voluntary” price control plan, enforced by
angry consumers.

Prices of white corn meal in South Africa have risen by 186 percent in the
last two years, due to poor harvests throughout much of southern Africa and
the demand-driven world price, which has been pushed higher by the demand
for ethanol produced by corn in the U.S. The number of people the U.N. calls
“food insecure,” particularly in Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Lesotho and southern
Mozambique, has gone from 3.1 million in 2006 to 6.1 million this year.

Imperialists use corn as weapon

In an article entitled “Foodstuff as Imperial Weapon: Bio-fuels and Global
Hunger,” Cuban President Fidel Castro pointed out, “The sinister idea of
turning foodstuffs into fuel was definitely established as the economic
strategy of the U.S. foreign policy on Monday, March 26th last.” Fidel
Castro quoted an Associated Press dispatch about George Bush’s meeting with
car company executives in which the U.S. president called on the industry to
modify engines to run on ethanol in order to reduce “reliance on imported
oil.”

In this dispatch, Bush said he was going to call on Congress to mandate the
production of 35 billion gallons of ethanol by 2017, which Fidel Castro
points out is a phenomenal amount that “will happen after a great number of
investments, which could only be afforded by the most powerful companies
whose operations are based on the consumption of electricity and fuel.”

Bush has claimed that the shift to ethanol might help clean up the
environment. Analysts argue, however, that the carbon released into the
atmosphere by the energy required to produce this amount of ethanol and the
huge amount of fertilizers needed to grow the corn would most likely be
higher than the carbon released by using oil.

The costs involved in substituting ethanol for oil will be very high, but
there also might be vast profits, something that drives capitalists ever
onward. Politically, the U.S. ruling class would very much like to reduce
its and the world’s dependence on oil from countries like Venezuela and
Iran.

Brazil is one of the world’s major producers of ethanol. It uses the waste
from sugar production, a substance called bagasse, to create ethanol. About
30 percent of the automotive fuel in Brazil is ethanol. Brazil’s ethanol
producers just announced that they intend to invest $9 billion to increase
production. Environmental activists in Brazil point out that this investment
will require clearing a major amount of Brazil’s Amazon rain forest.

A number of African countries—including Benin, Mali, Nigeria and Senegal,
led by Ghana—have been testing producing biofuel from jatropha, a weed that
is widely used to protect fields from livestock, which don’t like its taste
or feel. The seeds of jatropha contain oil, which has been used for a long
time to produce soap. But researchers have found that it is much cheaper to
produce biodiesel from jatropha than from corn or soy beans. And burning
jatropha-derived biodiesel produces one-fifth the carbon of burning
petroleum-derived diesel. The residue left after oil production can even be
used as fertilizer and to produce soap.

Since it is a perennial weed, jatropha grows well in very poor, arid
conditions without fertilizer or irrigation. Its roots, lying close to the
surface, stabilize the soil and for this reason it currently is planted on
earthen dams and dikes.

Mali, an extremely poor, landlocked African country, hopes to eventually
power all of the country’s 12,000 villages with affordable, renewable energy
sources derived from jatropha, which is widely used as a hedge by Malian
farmers. Aboubacar Samake, head of the jatropha program at the
government-funded National Centre for Solar and Renewable Energy, told
Reuters, “As things stand, a snake can bite someone in a village and they
have to go to [the capital] Bamako to get a vaccine.” With power, local
clinics can keep vaccines refrigerated.

India gave the Economic Community of Western African States $250 million to
investigate exporting biodiesel. Mali, however, is not going to start
producing jatropha for export until it has met the needs of its own people
for energy.

“They came to explain the project to us and said that if we grow jatropha it
can produce oil to make the machine work,” Daouda Doumbia, an elder in the
Malian village of Simiji told Reuters. Simiji was recently outfitted with a
biodiesel generator. “I grow groundnuts, and this activity can go alongside
it as a partner crop,” he explained.

Ghana, which is trying to develop jatropha cultivation, has found that
producing the oil is profitable for local farmers if they can get it to
market.

The real problem Africa and technologically underdeveloped regions of the
world have is poverty. They don’t have the money to develop, feed and
educate and care for their populations. And the whole thrust of the energy
policies of the U.S. and Western Europe is to force the countries which they
have kept impoverished to solve the world’s economic and ecological
problems, to the detriment of the oppressed.

_____

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From:

http://www.commondreams.org/news2007/0927-04.htm

Bush Agenda on Climate Change at Odds with International Push

However, MADRE cautions that the promises of these "biofuels" are a false
remedy and are more likely to perpetuate the injustices of land rights
violations against Indigenous and local people, increase global hunger and
destroy biodiversity. More information can be found in the MADRE statement
"Feed People, Not Cars: Agrofuels are no Solution to Climate Change,"
located here: http://madre.org/articles/int
<http://madre.org/articles/int/agrofuels.html> /agrofuels.html.

MADRE is an international women's human rights organization that works in
partnership with community-based women's organizations worldwide to address
issues of health and reproductive rights, economic development, education,
and other human rights. MADRE provides resources, training, and support to
enable our sister organizations to meet concrete needs in their communities
while working to shift the balance of power to promote long-term development
and social justice. Since we began in 1983, MADRE has delivered over 22
million dollars worth of support to community-based women's organizations in
Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, the Balkans,
and the United States.

http://madre.org/articles/int/agrofuels.html

Feed People, Not Cars

Agrofuels are no Solution to Climate Change

Why is Energy a Women's Issue?

In most of the Global South women are responsible for collecting household
fuel for cooking, lighting, and other family needs. Most of this energy is
derived from natural resources such as wood, charcoal, or dung. When fuel is
made scarce - for example, by deforestation or drought - women's and girls'
workloads increase sharply. In some communities, women spend many hours a
day collecting fuel.

Biofuels are being touted as a solution for "clean energy." Yet, most of the
policies being put forward envision substituting biofuels for fossil fuels
without reducing our overall consumption of energy. These proposals are
backed by agribusiness, biotech companies, and oil interests that are now
investing billions in ethanol and biodiesel plants, plantations of soy,
corn, sugarcane, and palm oil, as well as genetically engineered trees and
microbes for future supplies of cellulosic ethanol.

sub photo

The prefix "bio" suggests that "biofuels" are natural, renewable, and
safe-an appealing thought to those concerned with the toxic and
unsustainable use of fossil fuels. But agro-fuels (as they are known in
Latin America) are not easily renewable because the Earth's landmass is
itself a finite resource. To produce even seven percent of the energy that
the US currently gets from petroleum would require converting the country's
entire corn crop to ethanol.

If we don't reduce the demand for energy by consuming less, we risk a
scenario in which most of the Earth's arable land will be dedicated to
growing "fuel crops" instead of food crops. Growing agro-fuels on a mass
scale is already jacking up food prices, depleting soil and water supplies,
destroying forests, and violating the rights of Indigenous and local people
in areas newly designated as "biofuel plantations."

Agrofuels are a false solution to climate change because they:

* Violate Land Rights: Agrofuel plantations in Brazil and Southeast
Asia are being created on the territories of Indigenous Peoples who have
traditionally lived in and protected these ecosystems. Indigenous Peoples
and local subsistence farmers-many of whom are women-are being displaced.
People are being forced to give up their land, way of life, and food
self-sufficiency to grow fuel crops for export. Often, plantation workers
face abuse, harsh working conditions, and exposure to toxic pesticides. In
Brazil, some soy farms rely on debt peonage workers - essentially modern-day
slaves.
* Worsen Hunger: Agrofuel expansion threatens to divert the world's
grain supply from food to fuel. We know that when economic demand increases,
costs rise. That means staple foods like corn will become more expensive.
Already in June 2007, the United Nations reported that, "soaring demand for
biofuels is contributing to a rise in global food import costs."1
<http://madre.org/articles/int/agrofuels.html#fn1> The principle of supply
and demand also means that less people will grow food because "fuel crops"
will be worth more. Already, small-scale farmers in Colombia, Rwanda, and
Guatemala grow luxury crops such as flowers and coffee for export while
their families go hungry. Given the amount of land that would be required to
"grow" enough fuel to maintain the global economy, the threat of worsening
hunger and land rights abuses is grave. According to the Rainforest Action
Network, the crops required to make enough biofuel to fill a 25-gallon SUV
tank could feed one person for a year.
* Worsen Warming: Agrofuels don't necessarily reduce the greenhouse
gas emissions that cause global warming-especially if they are produced in
unsustainable ways. For example, currently, the most common method of
turning palm oil into fuel produces more carbon dioxide emissions than
refining petroleum. Agrofuel production has made Indonesia (where 40 percent
of the population does not have electricity) the third-largest emitter of
greenhouse gases in the world.
* Worsen Deforestation and Threaten Biodiversity: Corporate plans for
expanding biofuel production involve destroying forests and other ecosystems
to create massive plantations that rely on chemical fertilizers and toxic
pesticides to maximize production. Monoculture (single crop) plantations of
soy and palm oil are being established in the rain forests and grasslands of
Asia and South America, threatening some of the most biodiverse ecosystems
on Earth. Clear-cutting forests to plant agrofuels also adds to warming by
eliminating carbon-absorbing trees.

We need sustainable solutions to climate change, not corporate solutions
that seek to simply shift our energy addiction from one resource to another.
We need to consume less, not just differently, and steer clear of solutions
that would expand the reach-and all the pitfalls-of industrialized
agriculture. Creative and practical solutions for meeting our energy
requirements-including some local, sustainable agrofuel programs-are being
developed around the world. We can support proposals for developing
sustainable renewable energy sources, while recognizing the need to reduce
overall consumption and protect human rights-including everyone's basic
right to food.