A group of ecological pressure groups have come together to produce an open letter warning against the industrialisation of second-generation biofuels – the fuels that are expected to make use of synthetic- and systems-biology techniques to improve efficiency over the first-generation biofuels, based mainly on corn and sugar, in production today.
The groups include the Global Justice Ecology Project, Rainforest Action Network, Food First, Family Farm International Grassroots International and ETC Group, which was one of the first to start issuing warnings on the potential risks of industrialised synthetic biology.
The letter argues that the agrofuels – which critics prefer to biofuels as a term – present a "false solution" to energy woes, that the cultivation of agrofuels exacerbate climate change and poverty and that the scale of demand expected cannot be met sustainably. Most controversially, the letter claims agrofuels do not represent renewable energy sources. Intuitively, this last claim sounds bizarre. But I know what they are getting at: that removing all the plant waste from cropland denudes the soil and render it barren although that point is not made clear in the letter, it's just left as a broad claim.
The letter closes with a list of options that the groups believe offer better prospects than agrofuels, although they mostly concentrate on consumption reduction rather than alternatives to fossil fuels.
Although the groups raise valid points, the habit among pressure groups to simply say that agrofuel work needs to stop, or whatever else it is, tend to marginalise them. Backing up with claims that the fuels worsen climate change when the comparison is against a situation where fossil fuels are not used just gives their opponents easy targets. The letter argues "agrofuels produce from 17 to 420 times more greenhouse gas emissions than would be saved by avoided use of fossil fuels". Although they go on to argue that increased nitrous oxide production from the use of fertilisers could cancel benefits, the study they cite does not say that all biofuel crops would suffer this problem.
There does need to be work on how much plant waste is needed to sustain soils – whatever the crop – and to establish how damaging monocultures are to ecosystems. We need much better analyses of the effects of land-use change and of how different crops will affect the carbon balance. Not only that, we need a better understanding of the economics involved because many of the people working on biofuels or agrofuels believe they can help bring development to poorer countries, not to displace existing populations. Will a call for an outright ban on agrofuel development help or hinder that process?
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