Meredith Alexander, Head of Trade and Corporates
The decision to launch a campaign should never be taken lightly. 18 months ago, ActionAid held a global meeting to talk about the next phase of our HungerFREE campaign. People argued passionately about the importance of sustainable agriculture for increasing food production while responding to the threat of climate change (you can see our report here. People wanted to tackle the lack of investment in smallholder farming from countries rich and poor alike. Everyone acknowledged that women farmers should be getting much more support.
Then people started mentioning a new threat to our efforts to end hunger. Corn and wheat prices had shot up at the same time as huge amounts of American grain had been diverted from the food chain. Farmers in a number of countries were being forced off their land because companies wanted to grow sugarcane to make ethanol. Jatropha, a toxic plant, was growing on lands that used to produce food. Everyone agreed that biofuels sounded dangerous for the poor, but we needed to know more.
That meeting intensified ActionAid's biofuel research programme worldwide. From Guatemala to Ghana and from Italy to India, our efforts have been directed at understanding the positive and negative aspects of biofuels. Here's what we learned:
1) Biofuels cause hunger now: using crops to fuel cars instead of feed people pushes up prices, forcing more people into hunger.
2) Biofuels will make hunger worse in the future: rich countries are investing in biofuels to help stop climate change, but many biofuels cause more greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuels.
3) Biofuels are often a bad deal for the people who grow them: I met lots of small scale farmers growing jatropha in India, but none of them were getting a decent income.
4) Biofuels can be stopped: demand for biofuels in countries like the UK is driven by government regulation. If we all work together, we can change those laws!
That’s why I am demanding zero meals per gallon. What about you? You can join the campaign or if you aren't quite convinced, come to the Big Biofuel Debate to find out more.
Meredith Alexander, Head of Trade and Corporates
We’ve been alarmed to discover that Shell are investing $12 billion in the Brazilian sugarcane ethanol industry.
They have invested with Cosan, the most powerful brazilian bioethanol producer, who have been accused by the Brazilian government of ‘slave labour’ practices. This investment makes Shell the largest biofuel producer out of the major oil companies and undoubtedly also means Shell will start lobbying for even more support for the biofuel industry - including the reduction of tariffs on biofuel imports in the US. Further incentivising of biofuel imports will almost certainly lead to small-scale farmers in southern countries losing more land as foreign companies grab it to grow more biofuel.
We sent this letter to The Times in response to the news:
Sir, Shell's promise over a river of green fuel flowing from its sugar cane venture with Brazilian company Cosan must be treated with great caution. Biofuels may be touted as a solution to climate change in the transport sector but this argument hinges on whether a specific biofuel saves greenhouse gas emissions when compared to the fossil fuels they are replacing. This is far from certain.
Growing more sugar cane for cars needs more land, which can result in releasing more greenhouse gasses than can be saved by switching to ethanol. Even where new sugarcane plantations are grown on land away from tropical forests as is being claimed by Shell, it often displaces other agricultural activities into carbon rich habitats such as forests. It doesn’t matter if such habitats are destroyed to grow the sugar itself or to accommodate cattle or soybeans that have been pushed out by sugar. The result is the same and is called indirect land use change.
Measuring the impact of land use change is critical if the greenhouse gas emissions from all biofuels are to be correctly assessed. Get it wrong, and money invested into biofuels is money wasted. Greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rise and the impacts of climate change will fall disproportionately on poor people in developing countries with whom ActionAid works.
Emma Hughes, Campaigns Officer
Dear Mr Miliband…
Last December ActionAid were present in Copenhagen when a dreadful deal was stuck at the Copenhagen Climate Talks, one which certainly won’t keep us below the 1.5 degrees need to avert the worst affects of climate change.
Faced with the widely acknowledged failure of the talks Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for the Department of Energy and Climate Change, is turning to the British public to ask what he should prioritise next in the fight against climate change.
He’s come up with some useful suggestions of his own like getting Europe committed to 30% emission cuts by 2020, but a few pieces of the jigsaw are missing. In particular his eyes seem to firmly fixed on the international stage when there’s plenty he could be doing in Britain to tackle climate change.
One really important action Mr Miliband could take is to ensure there is no increase in the amount of industrial biofuels in UK petrol and diesel. Industrial biofuels will make both climate change and hunger worse - potentially releasing more greenhouse gases than fossil fuels.
So get on his campaign website right now to let Mr Miliband know that putting the brakes on biofuels should be one of his top priorities.
Simply tick the 'Other' box and then tell him you’re against using industrial biofuels in UK petrol.
If you’re stuck for words here’s some you might like to write (but feel free to adapt them)…
"Dear Mr Miliband,
I want to you to ensure that increased amounts of biofuel are not put into the UK’s petrol and diesel.
Biofuels could be worse for climate change than fossil fuels and threaten to push hundreds of millions of people into hunger by as early as 2020.
Please stop this unfolding disaster by ensuring that there are no targets for the increased use of industrial biofuels in the UK’s National Renewable Energy Action Plan.
Please focus on genuine solutions to the climate crisis – such as reducing fuel consumption"
Lets give Mr Miliband some food for thought…
Jenny Ricks, Head of campaigns
The UK’s international aid budget looks set to be a hot political issue this year and beyond. Legislation has been published to enshrine our commitment to 0.7% in law, but there’s no guarantees it’ll get passed – before or after the general election.
The public debate on the issue is changing, like this Times leader piece from last week shows. As what is going to be cut from our budget to fill the deficit takes centre stage politically, and words like ‘accountability’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘transparency’ become the new buzzwords around aid, we mustn’t lose sight of what aid is actually for. Whilst we can’t be blind to aid’s shortcomings and the necessary lessons we must learn, done right, it really does make a difference in tackling poverty over the long term.
An excellent letter to The Times in response today from ActionAid partner Malawi Economic Justice Network explains how good aid works in developing countries and how a strong civil society has a crucial role to play. As Deputy Director Dalitso Kingsley Kubalasa says: “Of course, development assistance can make things worse if it enlarges government bureaucracies, perpetuates bad governments or enriches elites. But where it is done properly, aid can help to build the ability of citizens, of grassroots groups, and institutions to hold leaders directly to account.”
This is the right approach, and a voice that needs to be heard louder in this debate.
ActionAid began campaigning against biofuels because they cause hunger; in particular we were horrified after our predictions warned that biofuels are likely to push hundreds of millions more people into hunger by as early as 2020.
As an active climate change campaigner I was equally worried to discover that biofuels could be even worse for the climate than fossil fuels, the very substance they were designed to replace. The terrifying double whammy of hunger and climate change convinced me that biofuels are something we should be using with extreme caution.
Well today it’s a full tank of bad news as the UK government report on their own biofuel usage (last year 2.7% of Britain’s transport fuel came from crops) confirmed that using industrial biofuels in vehicles could accelerate the destruction of the rainforest and result in higher green house emissions than petrol.
A meagre 4% of biofuels imported from abroad met the government’s environmental sustainability standards. This means the vast majority are increasing climate change emissions and pushing poor farmers off their land.
The Renewable Fuels Agency, who produced the report, also warned that fuel costs could rise in April because biofuel is being added to petrol and diesel making biofuels bad for drivers, bad for poor farmers and bad for the climate. With the government’s own report admitting that biofuels are a very dangerous idea now’s the time to stop putting biofuels in transport fuel.
Help the government learn the lessons set out in their own report – and demand zero meals per gallon
Emma Hughes, Campaigns Officer
Our Zero Meals Per Gallon campaign is all about food – in particular it’s about not putting food into cars.
What makes industrial biofuels so detrimental to our fight for a HungerFREE world is that their production competes with food production – crops that could go into people’s stomachs instead go into petrol tanks.
This creates more demand for food crops globally and therefore food prices rise.
We saw this in 2008 when global grain prices shot up – causing a world food crisis. Industrial biofuels played a crucial role in creating this crises – even the World Bank recognised the part they played.
“Large increases in biofuel production in the United States and Europe are the main reason behind the steep rise in global food prices.” Don Mitchell, Lead Economist in the World Bank's Development Prospects Group, 2008.
Current biofuel targets are already making staple foods less affordable for the poorest people, sparking riots across the globe from the Phillippines to India, from Mexico to Senegal.
But this is just the start. Targets are currently being set by the governments of rich countries which will massively increase the amount of land being used for biofuel crops. If all global biofuel targets are met food prices could rise by a terrifying 76% by 2020.
Our government are helping create this problem, they’re proposing to set targets which will mean 10% of all UK petrol and diesel comes from biofuel by 2020. The government will commit to these targets in June, if they do a HungerFREE world will be one step further away.
You can help stop them – demand Zero Meals Per Gallon.
ActionAid blogs
Latest on biofuels
Become a fan
Follow us on Twitter!
Recent Posts
Feeds
Archive
- Be part of our network
