Читать книгу The Biofuels Deception - Okbazghi Yohannes - Страница 8

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The New Geoeconomics of Biofuels: Lessons Still Unlearned

Since the 1992 Rio summit on the environment and climate, the subject of biofuels has shadowed the global debate on the triple crises of global energy insecurity, global climate change, and global poverty. This has created a gaping hole that has allowed transnational corporations to step in to shape the contours and direction of the debate. Indeed, the corporate world saw the triple crises as heaven-sent. They reassured the world that the gains from the new life-science revolution would solidify the geopolitical and energy security of nations, substantially reducing greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions and stabilizing the global climate, creating millions of green jobs, and lifting up billions of people from grinding poverty through the promotion of rural development and income generation.

According to the transnationals, the post-petroleum bio-economy will usher in a new era where all countries will rely on green liquid and solid sources of energy without fear of causing anthropogenic climate change, without fear of vulnerability to supply disruptions or global energy price volatility, and without fear of the political use of energy. The imagery and the propaganda that followed led to the global transport ethanol production soaring from 17 billion liters in 2000 to 52 billion liters in 2007, and biodiesel production growing from less than 1 billion to over 11 billion liters.¹ Indeed, the euphoric excitement in the potential of biofuels was such that the International Energy Agency (IEA, the international propaganda mouthpiece for industrial countries) projected that biofuels could constitute 23 percent of global transport fuels by 2050 through the conversion into biofuels of 1,500 metric tons of crop and forest residues per year, plus bioenergy crops grown on 375–750 million hectares of land (a hectare equals about 2.47 acres). This would be a necessary precondition to stabilize atmospheric carbon concentration at 450 parts per million (ppm) and keep global warming increases below 2 degrees Celsius by 2050.² Of course, this conjectural projection tells us nothing about the effects of such enormous production of biofuels on biodiversity, environment, and the atmosphere or on human food and animal feed production.

In any event, for those who must focus on capital accumulation, their obsessive preoccupation has been on how to adroitly create the subjective conditions that will combine with the urgency of the very real environmental crisis in such a way that biofuels will be seen as the way to solve the crisis but will also allow capital to solve its own crisis of overaccumulation. One objective factor facing industry is the presumed oil peak. Ever since the oil shocks of the 1970s, the bourgeois world has been haunted by the prospect of fossil resource depletion, something that found empirical expression in what is known as the “Hubbert peak.” In 1956, Royal Dutch Shell geologist King Hubbert developed a useful mathematical model that allowed him to assess the length of time it would take for the United States to use its petroleum resources before the resources begin to decline. In its simplest form, the hypothesis Hubbert formulated states that the duration of the supply of petroleum depends on the rates of discoveries, production, consumption, and the delivery infrastructure put in place. During the pre-peak period, production increases in a linear fashion because of new discoveries and the increasing deployment of capital to extract and deliver the resources. However, because petroleum resources are nonrenewable and finite, maximum production eventually peaks at a given point in the extraction process. Then, during the post-peak period, production of petroleum begins to gradually decrease, threatening the fossil-based economy. Interestingly, Hubbert’s depiction of the rates of discoveries, production, and consumption of petroleum in the United States was almost so precise that American petroleum production peaked at 9.6 million barrels a day in 1970, and then steadily declined to 5.1 million barrels a day in 2006, transforming the United States from having been a net exporter of oil in the 1950s to being a net importer of oil since the 1970s, importing 63 percent of its petroleum requirements by the turn of the century, even though shale oil discoveries and the fracking boom have now temporarily created illusionary abundance.³

The politicization of petroleum by Arab and other radical regimes in the 1970s, coupled with supply disruptions owing to natural conditions or social instability, as in Nigeria in the early 2000s, has strengthened the Hubbert peak hypothesis. Indeed, it has acquired such status that it haunts petroleum-importing OECD countries. These countries have now come to grudgingly view the Hubbert peak as the essential expression of the limits of nature to supply ever greater quantities of the hydrocarbons demanded to match limitless capitalist growth. Even the IEA acknowledges this reality. In its 2013 World Energy Outlook, the agency notes that its own investigation of more than 1,600 fields confirmed that, once production has peaked, the annual decline in output from a conventional oil field is around 6 percent on average. As a result, the output of conventional crude oil from existing fields worldwide is projected to fall by over 40 million barrels a day by 2035, requiring exploitation of shale oil and tar sands; more than half of the unconventional production is projected to offset the decline in conventional oil supply.⁴ This projection should be situated within the fact that by 2006 the world had used up half of the two trillion barrels of proven petroleum reserves. At the 2006 rate of annual consumption of 31 billion barrels, the world will exhaust all proven oil by 2042.⁵ It is the adroit orchestration of this ready-made objective condition that the Transnational Corporations (TNCs) have employed to win over industrial countries to the notion of biofuels as the answer to the actual and potential oil crisis. Undeveloped countries have also been brought on board with the promise of huge gains from specializing in bioenergy crop and biofuel production, in terms of both reducing their oil import bills and generating precious hard currency by exporting feedstocks to the Global North. The corporate promise that the specter of the Hubbert peak can be exorcised through a combination of synthetic substitutes for hydrocarbons and migration to bioenergy production has crystallized. The conventional discourse now is not so much about whether the Hubbert peak hypothesis is empirically supportable as it is about how to quicken the migration to renewable sources of energy, or how to move from fossil-based “black” energy to carbohydrate-based “green” energy. The financial crisis of the new century has provided additional momentum to the dogged determination of capital accumulators to quicken the migration to the biotic realm for biofuels, biochemicals, and biomaterials.

Anthropogenic-driven climate change is the second Trojan horse that TNCs have cleverly used to market biofuels as the long-awaited answer to the crisis of overaccumulation. Even a multitude of bourgeois non-governmental organizations, which long had fought for reduction in ghg emissions, have been won over to biofuels as the palpable solution, even though some of them have now backed off from their earlier enthusiasm. Former U.S. vice president Al Gore, through his well-received documentary An Inconvenient Truth, has been the leading spokesperson for various environmental groups that saw biofuels as climate- and environment-friendly.

The elimination of global poverty is the third Trojan horse. The TNCs have linked biofuel production to global poverty eradication. A sinister machination is at work here. Since most of the required feedstocks, either through the commercial enclosure of forests, savannahs, and grasslands or through direct conversion of existing agricultural land to feedstock production, are found in the Global South, specialization in biofuel production must be conveniently linked to poverty eradication. As the corporate narrative goes, developing nations could avoid importing costly petroleum by simply producing biofuels domestically to run their transport vehicles. Moreover, they could significantly increase precious foreign exchange by exporting feedstocks, and the rural population would immensely benefit since they are the real producers and suppliers of these resources. The employment multiplier effect could be enormous as feedstock growers, rural workers, transporters, and processers could increase in parallel with the expansion of the biofuel sector.

The counter-narrative I have developed in this book posits that the contemporary debate over the role of biofuels in the global economy is not about global energy and food security or about the challenges of global climate change. The biofuels revolution now being advanced by global corporations, their supporting governments, and corporate researchers will not produce national or global energy security, nor will it reduce global emissions or alleviate poverty anywhere. The underlying motivation of those who call for biofuels is not to solve energy and food shortages or reduce climate change. Rather, the goal is to resolve the anarchy of agricultural production in the Global North, brought about by the green revolution and the consequent transformation of agriculture into a food-manufacturing system during the second half of the twentieth century—a transformation made possible by integration with the petroleum industry. After all, the original pioneering champions of biofuels were not petroleum corporations or even governments concerned about disruptions in petroleum supply conditions, but rather global grain-trading corporations bedeviled by surplus grain on the world market causing extreme price volatility. Until the beginning of the new century, the major global grain-trading corporations had been befuddled by a perplexing paradox in the global food market. There was more food than needed by the affluent people in the rich nations, and much less than needed by those in the poor countries, where purchasing power was too low to buy the surplus food.

It was in this context that the idea of converting grain to biofuels was born. The overarching aim of agribusiness corporations, like Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Cargill, Bunge, and Louis Dreyfus, was to make all grains flexible. Grains could be used as human food and animal feed when prices are high enough to sustain corporate profit, or as feedstocks for biofuel production when global grain market conditions experienced fluctuations. Thus the competition between grains for human food and animal feed, on the one hand, and grains for biofuels on the other, could eliminate extreme volatility in prices. It must be borne in mind that the crises of industrial overcapacity, overaccumulation, and mass unemployment have not been confined to manufacturing. Metropolitan agricultural interests have long experienced similar secular stagnation in grain markets due to surplus production, while people in the Global South continue to endure stark poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. To state it differently, the origins of agricultural surplus production in North America and Western Europe are rooted in the transformation of agriculture into food manufacturing, wholly dependent on the petroleum industry for external inputs such as synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and fossil fuels for trucks, tractors, water pumps, and heating and cooling facilities. The European aphorism of “lakes of milk and mountains of cheese” tells the whole story of the crisis in agricultural overproduction. It was no accident that the original notion of converting grains into biofuels arose in the headquarters of ADM, when corporate managers urged policy makers to induce transitioning from petroleum dependency to biofuels under the rubric of the urgent need to diversify the country’s energy portfolio in light of the oil shocks of the 1970s.

An important upshot of the drive for biofuels has been the coalescence of the global grain-trading oligopolies and the emergent biotechnology corporations, which boosted grain production in the Global North on an unprecedented scale, resulting in the crisis of agricultural surplus production, and market volatility for grain traders. At the same time, people in the Global South lacked purchasing capabilities to absorb the surplus food, compounding the crisis of overproduction. In this context, the diversion of the surplus grain into liquid biofuel production would transform all grains into flexible raw materials that could be used for either food or fuels, thus overcoming the crisis of agricultural surplus production. Biotechnology corporations, however, found the stiff opposition by the public to engineered crops a formidable impediment to accumulation. Therefore, they found it convenient to link genetically manipulated (GM) crop production to the growing requirement of feedstocks for biofuel production. In addition, the competition between food and the supposed green fuels was expected to engender scarcity, thereby creating propitious conditions for using the emergent scarcity as a way to penetrate the global food market.

The convergence of interests between the grain-trading oligopolies and the biotech corporations led to the formation and consolidation of the biofuel-biotechnology industrial complex. This entity was determined to employ the triple crises in global poverty, global energy uncertainty, and global warming to shape and reshape the global food manufacturing system in ways that could purportedly solve the crisis of agricultural surplus production and, at the same time, find new outlets for the deployment of the overaccumulated capital. To effectively market this overarching corporate aim, the biofuel-biotechnology peddlers continued to refine their presentation of biofuels as offering climate mitigation, poverty alleviation, and energy security.. To do so, they not only rely on the mobilization of internal propaganda and financial resources but also on a galaxy of researchers, social climbers, academics, and opinion-molders. The latter, with unpardonable vanity, economic opportunism, and cravings for social recognition, had no difficulty transforming intellectual promiscuity into fungible equity, perpetually nurtured by towering expectations of promotion and pecuniary reward. The biofuel-biotechnology schemers are also aided by the ascendency of counterrevolutionary neoliberalism, which has effectively extended the commodification and marketization of nature to the reconfiguration of social power and state institutions, in effect transforming the state qua state as a geo-economic agent in the service of accumulation. The romantic illusion that the biofuel-biotechnology complex and its supporters portray is that we can only solve the triple crises by speeding up the transition of the green revolution to the gene revolution in order to produce resources in sufficient quantities to satisfy the competing demands for food, feed, fiber, and green fuels.

Concomitant with the consolidation of the biofuel-biotechnology industrial complex has come a climactic confrontation between two powerful visions of the future of the global food ecology—indeed, the future of humanity and nature itself. For analytical simplicity, I cast these as agroecology versus the green/gene revolution–driven agri-food complex. Agroecology juxtaposes the advantages and the development and sustainability goals that could be had from preserving and promoting regional and locally based strategies of diverse agriculture against the homogenization of the global food ecology, foundational to food security. On the other hand, the new global bio-masters boldly propose that the only way to feed the growing global population is through the acceleration of the green and gene revolutions, the requisite condition for generating surplus grains to produce biofuels that will simultaneously meet global energy requirements and contain global climate change.

Fewer things today make one cringe more than hearing advocates of biofuels invoke the image of inexhaustible biotic resources for making a smooth transition to a post-petroleum bio-economy with no harmful long-term consequences for the environment, climate, and the livelihoods of billions of people. The endless barrage of corporate propaganda tells us that, once the transition is made from the mechanical revolution that gave us the fossil-based capitalist civilization to the new frontier of green capitalism, the world will have continuous supplies of food, biofuels, biochemicals, bioplastics, and other varieties of biomaterials. The truth, however, is that these conditions are precisely what will make competition between food and biofuels unavoidable, worsening, not alleviating, the plight of the global poor. What looms even larger is the fact that the price hikes for grains, ineluctably arising from the competition between food and biofuels, will mean the dispossession of the land of large numbers of peasants and indigenous peoples in the Global South, to make way for large-scale commercial monocultivation.

The historical lesson to keep in mind is that the reason why billions of people in the Global South cannot access the world’s food surplus is that they have neither the purchasing capabilities nor the land resources to produce their own food because they have been stripped of their biosocial spaces. In this sense, inequality and poverty are historically and socially constructed. The crocodile tears that corporate managers shed for the plight of the global poor are simply public relations ploys. The corporate claim that biofuels will mitigate climate change is equally facile. As we shall see in later chapters, biofuels and the use of biomass for electricity and heat generation will not reduce global climate change. The conversion of forests, savannahs, grasslands, and wetlands into cropland to produce more grain to satisfy the competing demands for biofuels and human food requirements, the massive application of synthetic fertilizers to boost grain production, the processing of the grains using massive quantities of energy, the transportation of the biofuels to the market, and burning the biofuels in vehicles will aggravate, rather than ameliorate, emissions of CO₂, nitrous oxide, and other gasses into the atmosphere. The constant invocations of global energy insecurity, global food shortages, and looming climate change are simply aimed at deflecting popular resistance to and intellectual contestation of the conversion of grains to liquid fuels to grease and run the machine of capitalism. Thus my purpose in this book is to closely examine the ideological foundation and empirical presentations of what the proponents of the post-petroleum bio-based capitalist civilization call a paradigm shift in world energy production and consumption. My purpose is not revelation, for there is nothing left to reveal, but rather interpretation and refutation of the dangerously faulty ontological description and gross epistemological misrepresentation of nature’s biocapacity to furnish what the peddlers in biofuel production and biotechnology propose. My intention is to make a modest contribution toward the development and refinement of the counterhegemonic epistemology of agroecology, a crucial precondition for food security and climate change reduction.

Admittedly, the difficulties of doing so are compounded and confounded by the fact that the global bio-masters have adroitly integrated global food, biofuel, and biopharmaceutical production as the indivisible components of a singular bio-revolutionary process. The corporate anthem of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) promises to “feed, fuel and heal the world” by unlocking the biological mystery of nature, using new bioinventions and bio-innovations.⁶ Representing over 1,100 biotech organizations, BIO has been feverishly busy selling the idea of a world with infinite potential to produce food for everyone, green fuel to drive all stationary or moving machines or flying vehicles, and drugs to treat and cure all kinds of diseases. To this end, the biotech industry has deployed large brigades of bio-evangelists of enormous pedigrees to bring the new tidings to all.

This is how the corporate managers shed their crocodile tears: Worrying about starving future generations won’t feed them. Food biotechnology will. The world’s population is growing rapidly, adding the equivalent of a China to the globe every ten years. To feed these billions more mouths, we can try extending our farming land or squeezing greater harvest out of existing cultivation. With the planet set to double in numbers around 2030, this heavy dependency on land can only become heavier. Soil erosion and mineral depletion will exhaust the ground. Land such as rainforest will be forced into cultivation. Fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide use will increase globally. At Monsanto, we now believe food biotechnology is a better way forward. Our bioseeds have naturally occurring beneficial genes inserted into the genetic structure to produce—say—insect or pest resistance crops. The implications for sustainable development of food production are massive; less chemicals use in farming, saving scarce resources, more productive yields, disease resistance crops. While we have never claimed we have solved world hunger at a stroke, biotechnology provides one means to feed the world more effectively.⁷

The biofuel-biotechnology industrial complex and their corporate intellectuals have woven a tapestry of falsehoods into a seemingly coherent body of enticements, intent on presenting food crop cultivation and biofuel production as complementary processes mediated by the gene revolution. They tell us ad nauseam that genetically manipulated seeds will be immune to biotic and abiotic stressors since they will be drought and cold tolerant and disease-resistant; that they can produce bountifully greater yields of high nutritional value crops while conserving soil and using less fertilizers and pesticides; that the resistance to weeds contained within the GM seeds themselves will decrease the need for repeated application of chemical herbicides; and the resistance to pests will enable farmers to avoid the application of costly pesticides that may otherwise contaminate the environment. They even promise to engineer seeds and plants that can directly fix nitrogen from the atmosphere, thereby eliminating the need for synthetic fertilizer application altogether. Given this master narrative, it should not come as a surprise that biotech corporations acquired, between 2008 and 2010, sixty-one patents for droughttolerant crops.⁸ However, the underlying reason for all of this is the unyielding necessity for capital accumulation, with all that implies for workers and peasants. Against the backdrop of the corporate effort to reduce the crisis of capital overaccumulation to the triple crises in food, energy, and climate change, it is crucially important to point out the singular fact that these crises are only a microcosmic manifestation of the general crisis of what David Harvey calls the crisis of overaccumulation in the core capitalist countries. So a focus on the food, energy, and climate crises can only serve as a segue into the examination of capitalist production itself and its nefarious consequences.⁹

Since the biofuel-biotechnology peddlers have cleverly presented food and fuel production and climate change mitigation as indivisible goals, any scrutiny of their claims must be grounded in a larger epistemological framework. A focus on biofuels as antithetical to food production alone could be diversionary and reductionist unless the counter-epistemology is anchored in the larger context of capitalist civilization. Therefore, I will challenge the bedrock ideological foundation of capital accumulation to inquire into the structural drivers of accumulation, and to question the intellectual and professional integrity of those who readily lend their imprimatur to the process of accumulation. I will show how the supposed synthetic biological revolution, within which the prospects for an infinite supply of biofuels are subsumed, is pregnant with profound contradictions, as well as unforeseen consequences and perils for nature and society, which could be exceedingly difficult to cope with once the synthetic biological revolution becomes a reality. Biofuel production is simply a small piece of a larger agenda. The linchpin of the synthetic biological revolution is the development of biorefineries with multiplier force to produce all kinds of bioproducts, presumably replacing or displacing petroleum refineries.

In short, the overarching aim of my work is twofold. The first is to understand and explain the driving socioeconomic forces behind the rush to universalize the commodification and commercial enclosure of nature in search of bio-based products, inclusive of biofuels, biochemicals, bioplastics, and biomaterials. The second is to unravel the tapestry of mass deceptions, distortions, obfuscations, misrepresentations, and miscomprehensions woven together by the powerful mega-corporations and their intellectual defenders in the interest of global capitalist accumulation.

TOWARD A RADICAL ECOLOGICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

The Chinese ideogram of crisis has two characters: one for danger and the other for opportunity. This is akin to the Polanyian conceptualization of the double moments in the evolution of capitalist civilization that consist of a series of negations and affirmations, contradictions and revelations. According to Karl Polanyi, neoclassical economists, known more for their ferocity than their cogency, have succeeded in producing the utmost theoretical perversion of the capitalist economy by placing it above society and politics. This perverted laissez-faire doctrine of capitalism represents a utopian attempt to endow capitalism with natural principles of self-direction and self-regulation, a project that has sown the seeds of the system’s own ultimate destruction, since the consequent creation of market oppression and the social resistance to it have become the defining feature of this system. The resulting expansion of internal crises of accumulation impels owners of capital to attempt to overcome the perpetual internal crises through doing more of the same thing: overcoming the institutional barriers to their utopian goal of limitless growth through further market deregulation and trade liberalization, coupled with unbridled competition and capital market liberalization, ultimately reducing the state to a mere agent of accumulation.¹⁰

Granted, owners of capital have hitherto proved resilient in transforming crises into opportunities for fresh sources of accumulation through constant reorganizing of capital and restructuring of the global economy. Given the historical record, contemporary owners of capital do not see the socially constructed global hunger, the prospects of fossil fuel shortages, and looming climate change as signs of danger but as opportunities to expand the scope of accumulation as well as to reconfigure the structure of global capitalism in ways that strengthen its stranglehold on nature and society. To counter this perspective, let us look at some principles of radical ecological economics.

With respect to the organic nexus between the fundamental laws of motion governing the economy and those of nature, the French chemist Frederick Soddy (1877–1956) vigorously challenged the dominant neoclassical economic belief as one of the most dangerous formulations of our time. As he presciently argued, neoclassical economists, steeply socialized in Newtonian mechanics, had succeeded in giving the process of capitalist accumulation a pseudoscientific depiction by linking the economy to the laws of perpetual motion. With this profoundly insightful formulation, Soddy sowed the first seeds for the conception and birth of modern ecological economics.¹¹ Picking up where Soddy left off, others took his formulation to its logical terminus by demonstrating the ontological connection of the principles of evolutionary biology with the laws of motion governing the movement of geophysical forces, warranting the need for a biophysical theory of economics.

In his widely celebrated 1971 The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen systematically and meticulously exposed the ideological foundation of neoclassical economists who present the economy as being in a state of perpetual motion. By refuting the neoclassical notion that the economy could grow indefinitely without encountering contraction and dissipation of the matter/energy flow, he developed a pioneering work on ecological economics. Georgescu-Roegen maintains that production processes are invariably governed by the laws of thermodynamics; as such, they are subject to the entropy law by which matter/energy dissipates once work is performed. This is so because natural resources flowing into the production system are transformed into commodities and wastes, suggesting simultaneous depletion of low-entropy resources and increased generation of high-entropy wastes.¹²

Other writers have further enriched Georgescu-Roegen’s contribution to ecological economics. Herman Daly, for example, posits that understanding the economy as a subsystem of the earth’s ecosystem is a priority of the first order if human beings are to adequately grapple with issues of social equity, conservation, and sustainability. In his view, since the economy is an open subsystem of the total environment, entirely depending on it for the inflow of matter and energy and for the outflow of its wastes, the continuous physical expansion of the economy entails more demand for throughput to increase production and more sink to dispose of the generated wastes. In other words, since the earth’s environment is finite and non-growing, short of establishing an optimal scale of the economy at which the demand of the economy for flow throughput and sink is equal to nature’s capacity to renew itself and to absorb the wastes, the end result could be a catastrophe of the highest order for the total environment on which the reproduction of the economy depends. To avert the materialization of this scenario, Daly proposes a steady-state economy, one that neither depletes natural resources nor pollutes the environment beyond its ability to regulate and control ecosystem dynamics, hydrological processes, and biogeochemical cycles. This requires placing the total biomass extraction within the carrying capacity of the environment in which harvesting rate would not exceed the existing regeneration rate, and emissions would not exceed the assimilative capacity of the present environment.¹³

This formulation is consistent with the laws of thermodynamics. The first law of thermodynamics states that matter or energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only be transformed from useful and available to perform work to nonuseful and unavailable and is thus unable to perform further work. Here the second law provides extremely useful insights into the functions of ecosystems by highlighting the general irreversibility of energy once it is released to the environment in the form of heat after performing work.

According to this second law, entropic processes are bound to entail continuous reductions of low-entropy throughputs and corresponding increases in high-entropy wastes. The difficulty in reversing the dissipated energy to low entropy makes the entropic process in principle unidirectional. Even though recycling may serve as a palliative, 100 percent reversion of the original state is impossible in most cases. Suppose that Alex filled his gas-guzzling car with twenty gallons of gasoline in New York, but halfway to Washington his car ran out of gas. Where did the gas go? The answer is simple, it went up into the atmosphere in the form of emission as useless and unavailable energy. However desirous Alex was to recycle the dissipated gasoline, there was no means for doing so; he had to refill his car with fresh gasoline, repeating the cycle.

The point is that if the export of high-entropic wastes to the environment is greater than the ecological system’s capacity for processing and assimilating the wastes, increases in entropic dissipation inevitably accelerate.¹⁴ Human extraction of low-entropy throughputs from the environment, and transformation of those throughputs by economic institutions into goods and wastes beyond the equilibrium point, could disrupt the natural evolutionary processes or accelerate the dissipation matrices. One of the results could be erosion of the atmosphere’s ability to cleanse itself through the natural oxidation process. The erosion of this self-cleansing and self-renewing capacity generally results from human alteration of the biochemical cycles. After all, life is supported by how nitrogen, phosphorus, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and sulfur are combined in the right proportions and cycled, since these six elements make up 95 percent of all living things on earth.¹⁵ Thus human appropriation or synthetic mobilization of these elements to produce vast varieties of goods, such as biofuels, wood pellets, wood pulp, bio-based goods and bioplastics, could affect the biochemical cycles in ways that would impact climate and hydrology. Through reactive nitrogen mobilization to make fertilizer, for example, we change the nitrogen cycle by generating nitrous oxide, which contributes to the thickening of atmospheric greenhouse gases and results in climate change since nitrous oxide is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat.

The crucial point here is that the global physical system is thermodynamically closed in the sense that the global environment exchanges energy in the form of solar radiation but does not exchange matter with the solar system. However, the economy is open as a subsystem of the global environment, exchanging both energy and matter. The economy continuously receives throughput from the environment on one end of the loop and exports waste to the environment on the other end of the loop. As environmental economist Charles Perrings put it, the first interaction entails extractions from the environment in terms of depletion of virgin resources, and the second interaction involves general degradation of natural resources or insertions of pollution into the ecological system.¹⁶ Since the economy entails continuous material transformations, it thus stands to reason that ecological sustainability becomes a function of the difference between ecological capacity to provide goods and services and the quantity of insertions of high entropic wastes into the environment. This epistemological position is sound when considering how the hyperacceleration of capitalist growth in the last half-century gutted the biocapacity of the earth. Jeffrey Sachs¹⁷ recently calculated that the gross products the world is poised to produce by 2050 could be between $380 and $420 trillion compared to the $67 trillion produced in 2007 or to the $5 trillion produced in 1950. The global ghg emissions could be equally staggering, growing from 36 billion metric tons in 2007 to 87 billion metric tons by 2050. Sachs’s computation bears a powerful validation, supported by empirical evidence from China and India. The Chinese economy grew by 1,400 percent between 1980 and 2006 reaching $4.4 trillion by devouring massive quantities of virgin resources. At the same time, China’s emissions of CO₂ from burning fossil fuels went up from 407 million metric tons in 1980 to 1,665 million metric tons in 2006. Similarly, India’s GDP grew by 600 percent to $1.2 trillion over the same period, while its output of ghg emission increased from 95 million metric tons in 1980 to 411 million metric tons in 2006.¹⁸

What emerges from the preceding discussion are three cardinal principles for observing the laws of evolutionary biology and thermodynamics: sustainable scale, allocative efficiency, and social justice, which together define the organic compatibility between nature’s biocapacity and human needs. A violation of any of these principles will throw the relationship into fundamental disequilibrium, eventually resulting in an ecological system crash. How sheepherders in Iceland resolved a potential tragedy of the commons that was destroying their livelihoods should illuminate the point.

Several hundred years ago, the herders saw that grassland was on the verge of total collapse due to overgrazing by too many sheep. To save their collective welfare from utter destruction, the sheep owners took a decisive action to limit the number of the sheep by assigning quotas to all sheep herders in what they considered was compatible with the grassland’s carrying capacity. The grassland was restored to its previous state; so were the sheep wool and wool goods industry, with each sheep owner handsomely benefiting from the result.¹⁹ This is a vivid illustration of how a given mode of production to meet human needs must come to congruity with nature’s capacity to provide the needed throughputs and sinks if potential collapse of the system is to be averted. However, in the capitalist mode of production an unresolvable dilemma is that comporting with the natural order of things is as antithetical to capital’s endless growth mandate as it is beyond the moral scope of owners of capital.

The fundamental question that arises here is the extent to which the substitution of biofuels for fossil fuels could either halt or simply accelerate the metabolic transformation of natural resources and hence entropic degradation. This question invokes a note of caution in that the role of biofuels in the ecological balance is not monocausal, but rather additive to the causes of ecological depletion, degradation, and pollution from all sectors of the system. So giving material basis to the answer to the question requires situating the drive for biofuels in the ecological relations of production. As sociologist Lakshman Yapa correctly points out, the proper point of departure in the ontological recognition of the primacy of the environment begins with a focus on the ecological relations of production. Ecological relations of production are dynamic and complex relationships that exist between humans and nature, mandating a clear understanding of nature as a self-organizing, self-directing, and self-regulating living system, on the one hand, and as a “transformation of material into use values through the application of information, energy, and labor,” on the other. Furthermore, “Production uses the ecosystem not only as a source of energy and matter but also as a repository of waste products, thus continually defining a myriad of interactions within the biophysical environment.”²⁰

Thus the imperative to understand and protect the biophysical conditions of production becomes the first order of importance, as preservation of the biophysical conditions are central to the ecology’s continuous regeneration through self-fertilization, biological control of natural enemies, and self-cleansing, following the dictates of its own natural rhythm of temporal and spatial evolution. If collective human demands on the ecology for throughputs and sinks overwhelm and undermine its biocapacity to regenerate and self-cleanse in accord with the laws of evolutionary biology and thermodynamics, the result is the degradation of the biophysical conditions of production as has happened in the past. The reason for the demise of the Mayan civilization was the overuse of natural resources, leading to the complete deforestation and disintegration of their life-supporting ecology. To the same degree, the reason for the decay of the Sumerian civilization, the grain basket of antiquity, was the mismanagement of the irrigation system, which was once the envy of the world.²¹ The unfortunate thing is that we do not seem to have learned from the experiences of ancient civilizations. As Herman Daly²² poignantly notes, the resource depletion-driven decay of ancient civilizations had little or no long-term impacts in terms of global environmental destruction and atmospheric deterioration, because those civilizations were largely local. Furthermore, there was still ecological room for people to move elsewhere, giving their original biosocial spheres ample time for natural restoration. But humans have long crossed the Rubicon from the empty world to the full world where every aspect of the ecological relations of production is adversely affected by the ever-growing wants for throughputs and sinks. The interpenetration of ecological spaces and the hydrometeorological conditions makes the full world a single unit, where the effect of one ecological component reverberates in other components of the living system. When Brazil cuts down Amazon forests to make wood pellets for electricity and heat generation in Great Britain, the consequent deforestation disrupts the carbon balance, eroding the Amazon forest ecology’s capacity to sequester carbon dioxide and regulate the climate, hence increasing global warming. When Indonesia converts millions of hectares of peatland into oil palm plantations in order to satisfy European demand for biodiesel, an inordinate amount of carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere that affects every nation. When Ecuador converts tens of thousands of mangrove forests into industrial fish farms to raise shrimp for export to North America, the liquidation of the mangrove forests entails subtraction of invaluable natural assets from the global stock of forests that provide crucial ecosystem services, including carbon sequestration, shoreline stabilization, coastal protection against erosion, and critical habitat and food for a galaxy of species.

During the second half of the twentieth century, demography and the hyperacceleration of the capitalist transformation of use value into exchange value conspired to break up the homeostatic interactions between human societies and nature. Demographically, when Thomas Robert Malthus revised his essay in 1825 on the relationship between population and food supply, the number of humans on the planet barely graced the one billion mark; one hundred years later that number doubled; today we have crossed the 7 billion threshold, projected to reach over 9 billion by 2050. This means that the aggregate demands that humans are making on the ecology of the already full world to meet our nutritional needs and dispose of our waste have exponentially grown, undermining nature’s biocapacity for regeneration and self-cleansing. For example, at the turn of the nineteenth century, forests had covered 5 billion hectares, which dropped to less than 4 billion hectares by the turn of the twentieth century, as the expansion of agriculture, pasture, firewood, lumber, and paper production took heavy tolls on forests. The growth of the pulp and paper industry, in particular, doubled down on the destruction of the global forest ecology, regardless of territorial boundaries, as global paper consumption increased by 423 percent between 1961 and 2002, with far-reaching implications for the livelihoods of forest-dependent people, ecosystem integrity, and the carbon balance.²³

The most destructive force, however, has been the capitalist transformation of use value into exchange value, not necessarily to satisfy human needs but to further strengthen the process of accumulation. This phenomenon has led to the hyper-acceleration of production, whose demand for throughputs and sinks has proved beyond nature’s biocapacity to supply food, feed, fiber, and other throughputs. For example, the near exhaustion of nonrenewable resources is the background to the contemporary rush to divert more and more grains and oilseeds into biofuel production. This has led to the bifurcation of agriculture into chemical-dependent industrial agriculture, which produces most grains and commodities, and the agroecological mode of cultivation that supports the dispossessed mass farmers. Today, there are 500 million smallholder farmers in developing countries whose food production accounts for 15 to 20 percent of overall food production and yet feeds nearly 80 percent of the world’s population.²⁴ These small farmers, for the most part, do not infringe upon the ecological relations of production, since they closely follow nature’s biocapacity to regenerate, employing practices such as retention of vegetation, integration of agroforests, integration of livestock into their farms, and reliance on organic inputs. Of course, the growth in their number, coupled with the fact that they are continually being pushed off to marginal areas by big industrial farmers, is interfering with the operation of the ecological relations of production.

To illustrate the extent of the migration of capital to biofuel, biochemical, and biomaterial production, following is a brief review of the impacts of industrial agriculture on the ecological relations of production from the perspective of ecological economics. The aim is to elucidate whether biofuels could contribute to poverty alleviation, climate change mitigation, and energy security without impacting the ecological relations of production.

Following the Second World War, the mechanical revolution in manufacturing was exported to the agricultural sector via capital’s increasing appropriation of land and water resources and the mechanization of agriculture. As a result, the conversion of forests, savannahs, grasslands, and wetlands into croplands, supported by extensive irrigation works and intensive use of synthetic inputs, grew to an unprecedented scale. Worldwide, the area put under cultivation between the 1950s and the turn of the century quadrupled, as a result of which overall annual world food production increased by 44 percent, while growth in cereals increased by 59 percent; of the 1,600 million hectares under production at the beginning of this century, 302 million hectares were equipped with irrigation, accounting for 40 percent of overall food production. The total area under cultivation is projected to increase by another 235 million hectares by 2050 (all of it in the Global South), which will produce 1 billion metric tons of additional cereals that will be needed to feed the new human arrivals, and grow the feedstocks that will be required to produce biofuels. Even though agribusiness interests and their supporters attempt to reassure us that 80 percent of the additional food production increases will come from intensification of production in the form of higher yield productivity and intensity of cropping, the projected additional grain supply would come only by converting more and more forests, savannahs, and grasslands into cropland. The reason is simple: the rates of growth in yield of the major food crops have long been falling alarmingly. For example, growth in wheat yields declined from about 5 percent a year in 1980 to 2 percent in 2005; yield growth in rice and maize dropped from more than 3 percent a year to 1 percent during the same period. Projecting into the future, yields of the major food crops will fall further to 0.8 percent per year by 2030 and to 0.5 percent per year by 2050. Owing to temperature warming, the overall agricultural output in developing countries could fall by 9 to 21 percent. The secular stagnation in the yields of the major crops is projected to result in real price increases of 59 percent for wheat, 78 percent for rice, and 106 percent for maize during the period between 2010 and 2050.²⁵ Considering this objective reality, can the world produce sufficient biofuels to make a difference in the overall mix of energy without affecting global food supply and global food price? The answer is, of course, no.

In addition to the secular stagnations in yield productivity, the imponderable magnitude of the impacts of climate change and uncertainty in the patterns of rainfall on global food production still await a reckoning. Projections suggest that there could be a shortfall of 350 million metric tons of food grain by 2025 due to water shortages—a loss of grain equal to the total U.S. food grain produced in 2005.²⁶ In addition to the decline in food grain production, another result of water shortages could be the disappearance of many species of grain and plants, representing substantial reductions of ecological resources with serious implications for the temporal and spatial evolution of nature. During the twentieth century alone, around 75 percent of plant genetic resources are estimated to have been lost, and a third of today’s diversity could be entirely wiped out by 2050. Between 1970 and 2010, the populations of freshwater, marine, and territorial vertebrate species were reduced by 52 percent.²⁷

Notwithstanding the serial liquidation of ecological resources and the inexorable reduction of species populations, today 1.25 billion people live in absolute poverty; 768 million people have no access to safe and clean water; and 162 million children under five years of age are stunted or wasted.²⁸ There is dark irony in this situation in that the proponents of biofuel-biotechnology use this grim reality to justify the further enclosure of nature, arguing for the production of more grain and feedstock through the gene revolution, which will then miraculously result in poverty alleviation and climate change mitigation. The truth is that the logic of capitalist accumulation and the resultant unequal distribution of resources and purchasing capabilities are responsible for the deplorable maelstrom of material deprivation, malnutrition, starvation, and hydro-destitution of hundreds of millions of people in the Global South (with growing numbers in the Global North). For instance, even though in 2010 the world had a food surplus that could have fed the entire human population one-and-a-half times, the FAO reported that there were 925 million people who were going to bed hungry every night. In 2011, there were forty-five countries with per capita yearly food consumption under $1,000, and fifteen of them were projected to remain stuck in stagnant poverty with less than $1,000 per capita yearly food consumption by 2050.²⁹ This peculiar conundrum of concurrently having too much food and having too many hungry people who lack purchasing capabilities for the surplus food is a perfect illustration of the gross incongruity that exists between the capitalist mode of production, geared to the maximization of exchange value, and the imperatives of the ecological relations of production. Yet, agribusiness and metropolitan countries still intend to solve this fundamental contradiction in capitalist agriculture by diverting the surplus food to biofuels production. Of course, the hidden purpose masked by this rhetoric is, as we have seen, that the conversion of grains to biofuel production could simultaneously resolve the crisis in agricultural surplus production in industrial countries and the crisis of global energy shortages, as a result of which the continuous expansion of accumulation by dispossession would be put on a permanent course. Meanwhile, the fate of the hungry billions shall fade into oblivion.

The new dynamic of competition between food crops and biofuel production takes on an even more obscene dimension with the growing intensification of the capitalist mode of livestock production. By the turn of the twentieth century fully one-third of world grains and oil seeds were already being fed to livestock. Indeed, the liquidation of enormous ecological resources associated with the expansion of the global industrial food manufacturing system is being aggravated by the increase in the industrialization of the livestock mode of production, creating a shift in dietary habits in the Global South as more and more people imitate the Euro-American style of meat consumption. For example, since the 1980s, meat and egg consumption in the Global South increased twofold and fivefold, respectively.³⁰ There is no mystery to this grim reality. Industrial mass livestock production occurring in conditions of land shortages, by definition, requires the diversion of land resources from human food crops to concentrated feed production, making food and feed direct competitors. Note that North American–style meat production requires three to four times as much land, and two to four times as much reactive nitrogen fertilizers. It was no coincidence that most of the 45 percent of temperate deciduous forests, 27 percent of tropical forests, 70 percent of grasslands, and 50 percent of the savannahs converted to agriculture during the twentieth century was accounted for by the relentless expansion of the livestock mode of production.³¹

During the second half of the twentieth century in particular, industrialization of the livestock mode of production paralleled the industrialization of the green revolution–driven production of grain cereal and oilseed. By the beginning of the 1990s, 1.7 million metric tons of grains and oilseeds were fed to livestock, augmented by the conversion of 275 million hectares of forests and savannahs to planted pastures. By the turn of the twentieth century, 70 percent of grain in the United States had already been fed to livestock. The feed crops grown on 130 million hectares of U.S. cropland could have fed 400 million hungry people. If the entire livestock sector worldwide were to revert to the natural grass-based mode of livestock production, large amounts of grain could be freed, enough to meet the nutritional needs of one billion hungry people.³² However, doing so would be antithetical to the overriding obsession with capital accumulation by bio-vandalization and human dispossession.

The driving force behind the intensification of the capitalist mode of livestock production has been what Jeremy Rifkin calls the “steers complex,” where vast swaths of forests, savannahs, and cropland are converted to planted pastures and specific feedcrop production to supply animal feed to the rapidly proliferating feedlots in the Global North.³³ The unprecedented expansion of planted pastures and soybean monocultivation in Latin America was behind this drive for centralization and concentration of the livestock mode of production. In Brazil, for example, the area under soybean monocultivation soared from 23 million hectares in 2005 to 42 million hectares in 2014, and is projected to soar to 100 million hectares at the expense of frontier forests and savannahs.³⁴ Bilateral and multilateral lending institutions in the Global North have aided the transformation of traditional grass-based to industrial livestock production. Between 1971 and 1977 alone, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank doled out $3.5 billion in loans and technical assistance to big commercial cattle producers in Latin America. Predictably, privileging feedcrop production over human needs has had a deleterious impact on the availability and accessibility of grains for human consumption. In Mexico, sorghum (historically unknown in the country) displaced corn production in many localities in order to meet the growing demand for sorghum as animal feed. Moreover, in the 1960s, a mere 6 percent of the Mexican corn was fed to cattle, growing to 33 percent by 1990, reducing the corn available for tortilla production, the staple of Mexican diet. While the urban elite and landed aristocracy deepened their meat-based lifestyle, millions of dispossessed Mexicans found themselves thrown into the maelstrom of material deprivation and urban squalor or perilous international migration.³⁵

In sum, what the migration of capital to biofuel production does is triangulate the traditional competition between human food and animal feed by adding biofuel to the mix since the amounts of grains and oilseeds going into biofuel production must be subtracted from food and feed, or more forests, savannahs, and grasslands must be converted to cropland to grow feedstocks. Even worse, the simultaneous diversion of food crops and conversion of virgin ecological resources to biofuel production could grow exponentially just as the demand for the same resources by the global livestock sector is projected to grow exponentially. According to the FAO, global meat production is expected to grow from 229 million metric tons in 2001 to 465 million metric tons by 2050, while that of milk is projected to grow from 580 million metric tons to 1.043 billion metric tons. Correspondingly, the additional demand for feed crop is expected to increase by over one billion metric tons by 2050, and the additional pastures required to support the growing number of the livestock population will be 5.4 million square kilometers.³⁶

From the point of view of the ecological relations of production, the rise in the global livestock population, the methods by which livestock is raised, the amount of plant biomass appropriated for the livestock sector, and the services required to support them will have severe implications for the state of climate, environment, and hydrology. As bio-economists Nathan Pelletier and Peter Tyedmers computed, if the current trends in industrial livestock production continue until 2050, the safe operating space for greenhouse gas emissions occupied by the livestock sector will increase by 70 percent, while biomass appropriation for the livestock population will increase by 88 percent and synthetic nitrogen mobilization by 294 percent, expressed in a cascade of deforestation, environmental degradation, ghg emissions, and freshwater depletion.³⁷ These conditions are bound to worsen as many developing countries continue to imitate the patterns of advanced countries in industrial livestock production and heavy meat consumption, entailing conversion of forests, savannahs, grasslands, and wetlands into cropland for commercial concentrate animal feed production. The 1,543 million metric tons of grain cereals, pulses, brans, oil cake, oil crops, and roots and tubers that were fed to livestock in 2005 are projected to double by 2050.³⁸ The amount of cereals and coarse grains directly appropriated to feed the additional global livestock population in 2050 is an amount that could be enough to feed an extra 4 billion people.³⁹ Thus, analysis of the livestock mode of production relative to the ecological relations of production supplies additional evidence to illustrate how the dynamic interactions between economic forces and the laws of evolutionary biology and thermodynamics operate. As the first law of thermodynamics states, nothing is created out of nothing; to create something, a given unit of throughput must be taken out of the general stock of natural resources for conversion into goods and wastes. The scale of the throughput taken out of the general stock of natural resources determines whether the sustainability and status of the general ecological stock is maintained. If the unit of throughput being used falls within the regenerative capacity of the natural environment, then the law of sustainable scale is respected. However, as noted earlier, in addition to worsening the triangulation of competition for grains and oilseeds and hence for land and water resources, the industrial livestock revolution has already contributed immensely to the erosion of the ecological relations of production. This violates the fundamental principle of sustainable scale in three crucial ways.

First, to set up animal farm operations, land must be cleared of vegetation; the sorts of ecosystem services provided by the natural vegetation are discounted in terms of the future or not counted at all. Today, livestock grazing already occupies 26 percent of the earth’s ice-free land surface, while 33 percent of agriculture is devoted to feed-crop production, well beyond sustainable scale. This suggests that the ecological impact per unit of livestock production must be cut by 50 percent just to decrease the damage to the ecology beyond the present level. Note that the livestock revolution is responsible for converting 70 percent of previously forested land in the Amazon to pastures. Worldwide, 20 percent of pastures and 73 percent of rangelands had already been degraded by the turn of the twentieth century due to overgrazing, livestock action, and soil compression or compaction. In the United States, for example, the livestock sector is responsible for 55 percent of all soil erosion and sedimentation, 37 percent of pesticide use, 50 percent of antibiotic use. and 33 percent of freshwater pollution and contamination with nitrogen and phosphorus loads. All told, over a period of forty-four years since 1962, 270 million hectares of forests were converted to pastures, and 120 million hectares more are projected to be converted to pastures before 2050.⁴⁰ The expansion of the livestock sector above the level of sustainable scale has no doubt immensely contributed to the radical alteration of the ecology. It is no surprise that the livestock sector is recognized as the major driver of biodiversity loss through deforestation, fragmentation, land degradation, pollution, livestock-induced climate change, sedimentation of wetlands, and the facilitation of invasive species. In fact, 306 of the 825 ecoregions in the world across all biomass and biogeographies are said to be threatened by livestock. Of the thirty-five global areas in significant danger for biodiversity loss, twenty-three are said to be adversely affected by livestock production.⁴¹

Second, the livestock sector puts too much waste into the environment and the atmosphere, far beyond the waste-processing capacity of nature. In part, this stems from the industrial intensification of livestock production, resulting in the excessive concentration of their waste in limited areas instead of being usefully spread as fertilizer across scattered grasslands and cropland. For example, one giant farm in Utah with 1.5 million head of hogs was found to have a sewage problem larger than that of the city of Los Angeles. Likewise, a mega-farm in central North Carolina, where hogs outnumber people, was found producing more fecal waste than the states of California, New York, and Washington combined.⁴² Moreover, since the livestock revolution denotes a transition from the extensive grazing system to industrial livestock concentration and operation in limited areas, industrial livestock production unavoidably fosters the acceleration of the demand for more animal feed and the mobilization of more reactive nitrogen required to boost production of feed crop. Since industrially fixed nitrogen determines the productivity of cropland dedicated to animal feed, more of it must be synthetically fixed, with disturbing implications for the natural carbon cycle. It is no accident that the global amount of reactive nitrogen generated by humans is more than the amount provided by all natural terrestrial systems. What the livestock revolution does is increase reactive nitrogen mobilization, most of it eventually ending up in water bodies and the atmosphere. Livestock manure by itself accounts for two-thirds of anthropogenic nitrous oxide emission, which is 300 times more potent in trapping heat than carbon dioxide.⁴³ Emissions result not only from animal manure, urine, and other animal wastes, but also from clearing forests to create pasture, the application of nitrogen and phosphorus to boost animal feed production, the intensive use of fossil energy to transport animal feed, the transportation of processed animal products to markets, and fossil energy used for heating and cooling animal operation facilities.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the world was producing 100 million metric tones of petroleum-derived reactive nitrogen annually to grow livestock feed alone. Unsurprisingly, livestock populations are responsible for emissions of 2.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per annum, from combinations of livestock-driven deforestation, soil cultivation, land deterioration, desertification, and reactive nitrogen mobilization. Again, it is no accident that the current mode of livestock production accounts for 65 percent of anthropogenic nitrous oxide emissions 37 percent of methane emissions, and for 64 percent of anthropogenic ammonia emissions, which generates acid rain and causes acidification of vast areas in the world. The anthropogenic disturbance of soils related to the expansion of feed-crop production in particular has far-reaching ramifications for the earth’s carbon balance, since soils are the largest reservoir of carbon, storing between 1,100 billion and 1,600 billion metric tons, compared with 560 billion metric tons contained in living vegetation and 750 billion metric tons in the atmosphere. It is estimated that pasture production–induced oxidation alone results in 100 million metric tons of CO₂ emissions per annum, accompanied by 3 billion metric tons of CO₂ emissions from the respiratory processes of livestock production, 86 million metric tons of methane from enteric fermentation, and 17.4 million metric tons of methane emissions from manure decomposition.⁴⁴

The ecological and atmospheric impacts of industrial livestock are compounded by a global meat manufacturing system that is fully integrated into the agrochemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing systems. In the United States, 37 percent of pesticides and 50 percent of antibiotics are consumed in the livestock sector. The amounts of the chemical compounds, antibiotics, and growth hormones not assimilated by livestock and their feed crops are put back into the environment; 50 percent of synthetic nitrogen applied to crop production is released and enters downstream natural assets with far-reaching impacts on ecosystem functions. Since capital accumulation in the livestock sector and accumulation in the chemical/pharmaceutical manufacturing system have now become coterminous, the combined effects of production in the two realms will continue to have a force multiplier effect of degradation on ecosystem functions. For example, the annual global emissions of air-polluting ammonia grew from 18.8 million metric tons at the beginning of the twentieth century to 56.7 million metric tons by the 1990s and is now conservatively projected to increase to 116 million metric tons by 2050.⁴⁵

Third, the livestock revolution exerts enormous pressure on the ecological relations of production relative to ever-diminishing freshwater resources. Water withdrawals are already intensively used for animals, for growing and processing animal feed crops, cleaning and cooling farm animal facilities, and for processing livestock products. As Colin Tudge has trenchantly pointed out, today’s average farmer uses 500 liters of water to grow 1 kilo of potatoes, 900 liters to grow 1 kilo of wheat, and 2,000 liters to grow 1 kilo of rice. In contrast, the same farmer uses 3,500 liters of water to raise a kilo of chicken and 100,000 liters of water to obtain a kilo of beef. In addition, the multiplication of animal farm operations will grossly interfere with the processes of hydrological circulation and regulation, making the natural replenishment of water systems difficult due to the compaction of soil, reduction in infiltration, degradation of river banks, salinization, depletion of floodplains, and the lowering of water tables.⁴⁶

There is also the problem of quality. The livestock revolution will continue to compromise the integrity of the global hydrology through pollution, contamination, and eutrophication of freshwater bodies, following the insertions of animal waste, reactive nitrogen, phosphorus, pesticides, antibiotics, countless growth hormones, and other synthetic agents into natural water systems. In the United States, the livestock sector is responsible for 33 percent of the synthetic nitrogen and phosphorus load inserted into freshwater bodies, causing nitrate contamination, acidification, and eutrophication of immense proportions. The quantitative diminution and qualitative deterioration of water supplies will occur in the alarming context of the fact that, by 2025, 64 percent of human population will be living in water-stress basins, and 1.4 billion people will be living in water-scarcity regions. By 2014 two billion people were already living in river basins where they experienced water scarcity at least one month in a year.⁴⁷

What all of the preceding means is that the principles of sustainable scale, efficient allocation, and social justice have long been violated by the hyper-acceleration of resource extraction and waste production. The regenerating and self-cleansing capacity of nature has been hollowed out in the past fifty years because too much raw material has been taken out of nature to keep the machine of capitalist accumulation going, and too much waste had been dumped into the environment and the atmosphere. The overextraction of forest resources compounded the erosion of the global forest ecology’s capacity to provide essential ecosystem services such as temperature regulation, carbon sequestration, rainfall generation, water purification, erosion prevention, flood control, and protection of critical habitat for countless animal species. Likewise, the loss of 50 percent of global wetlands, mangroves, estuarine and deltaic resources during the past fifty years gutted the capacity of these ecosystems to provide such essential functions as carbon sequestration, shoreline stabilization, erosion and flood control, aquifer recharges, water purification, sediment detention, chemical absorption or neutralization, and the provision of critical habitat to countless terrestrial and aquatic species. It must also be borne in mind that it is estimated that the Amazon forests pump into the atmosphere 20 billion gallons each day from their stored water of 8 trillion metric tons. This is said to be equivalent to the energy of 80,000 coal-fired super-giant power stations performing the same job every day. The Amazon basin receives half of its rainfall from its own hydrologic cycle. In the Congo basin, 75 to 95 percent of rainfall comes from recycled moisture within the basin itself.⁴⁸ The natural allocative efficiency of forests as drivers of evapotranspiration, cloud formation, the hydrologic cycle, and regulation of climate is organically connected to the distributions, structures, characteristics, densities, and contiguities of forests, which determine the frequency and intensity of precipitation.

THE STRUCTURAL DILEMMA

The above broad description leads to this fundamental question: Could biofuels be produced (both first-generation and second-generation) in sufficient quantity to grease the machine of global capitalism without worsening resource depletion, environmental degradation, and atmospheric deterioration? Even though the core chapters in this book will provide the complete answer to the above question, a prefatory word is in order here. To restate the case once again, since nothing is made from nothing, it stands to reason that the throughput required to produce biofuels must come either from the diversion of food and feed crops in sufficient quantity to biofuel production or from the conversion of more and more forests, savannahs, and grasslands to cropland to grow feedstocks. There is no other option. The emergent competition between food, feed, and biofuels occurs in the context of projected global population growth, and the rising income of the middle class in emerging markets, who demand more food and more meat products. In a nutshell, the addition of biofuels to the competition between food and feed can only worsen the stark state of the global ecology and climate. In 2005, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report, comprehensively and meticulously prepared by 1,300 world scientists, pointed out that fifteen (60 percent) of the twenty-four ecosystems they evaluated were being exploited at or beyond their regenerative biocapacity. The annual cost of lost ecosystems and biodiversity associated with the competition between food and feed was already in the range of $2 trillion and $4.5 trillion, a magnitude that will go up with the addition of biofuels.⁴⁹

There are three risks associated with biofuel production as the third competitor for throughputs. First, as the land resources grow scarce because of the competition between the three production sectors, extremely valuable ecosystems will be vulnerable to commodification and commercial enclosure, short-circuiting the provision of essential ecosystem services. For the world to secure 10 percent of transport fuels from biofuel production by 2030, between 118 million and 505 million hectares of new cropland must be found to grow the required feedstocks, compared to the 38 million hectares of cropland used for feedstock production in 2008. This is equal to between 8 and 36 percent of the world’s existing cropland. Note that at the current rate of cropland acquisition required to meet the growing demands for land resources, between 320 million and 850 million hectares of forests, savannahs, and grasslands would have to be converted to cropland by 2050, which is equal to the combined size of Indonesia, Ethiopia and Brazil. On top of this, other sectors of the global economy will continue to put additional pressure on the land resource base. For example, infrastructures, urban expansion, and settlements are projected to increase by between 260 million and 420 million hectares by 2050, encroaching upon agriculture. In the past, around 80 percent of urban expansion occurred at the expense of agricultural land. Furthermore, the area dedicated to biomaterial production is expected to increase by up to 215 million hectares by 2050. In addition to the stridently continuing ambition and determination of biofuel peddlers to secure ever-growing quantities of feedstocks, developing countries are desperate to secure more cropland to grow food to avoid hunger and alleviate poverty, as well as to narrow the gap in global inequality. In India, for example, where 52 percent of the population live in poverty and 45 percent of children under five are stunted or wasted, the metabolic rate of natural resource appropriation is a mere 4.6 metric tons per person per year compared with 25 metric tons in Canada. This grim reality compels India to seek more arable land to grow needed food. So the pressure of cropland expansion, land competition, land intensification, and land-use change on ecosystems and climate is not hard to imagine. Second, since the feedstocks used for biofuel production are also used to produce food and feed, the resulting competition will drive food prices upward, hurting most particularly the poor, who spend 50 to 80 percent of their income on food. Third, as we shall see in later chapters, biofuel production is water-intensive at both the cultivation and processing levels, thus competing not only with food and feed production but also with human needs for drinking and cleaning. Moreover, land-use change from clearing vegetation and reactive nitrogen mobilization to boost feedstock production present a double jeopardy in terms of ghg emissions and nitrogen pollution of water expressed in acidification and eutrophication of important hydrological systems. Note that 20 percent of carbon emissions in the 1990s were directly related to land-use change.⁵⁰

Even though the green revolution has resulted in impressive gains, as key to the construction of the global food manufacturing system it prepared the conditions for unsustainable land competition, soil degradation, soil erosion, nutrient pollution, salinization, eutrophication, agrochemical contamination, biodiversity loss and ghg, all related to land-use change, intensification of industrial agriculture, exorbitant reactive nitrogen mobilization, and monopolization of irrigation.⁵¹

As food, both feed and biofuels compete for lands and water resources; the first casualties are forests, savannahs, grasslands, and wetlands, which are not only repositories of ecological resources and genetic materials, but also regulators of climate, carbon stores, and providers of food and shelter to countless species. Indeed, the context for the exhaustion and degradation of many ecosystems has been that over 500 million hectares of forests, savannahs, and grasslands were converted to agriculture and pasture between 1962 and 2006 in the Global South, at a time when industrial countries lost 54 million hectares of cropland to urban and suburban sprawl, as well as transportation and communication infrastructure. The global pulp and paper industry, which still annually devours over 400 million metric tons of forest resources, has already been one of the major drivers of deforestation, something that will grow worse as more woody bioenergy plants are targeted by the biofuel-industrial complex for conversion to so-called second-generation biofuels and wood pellets.⁵² The unsavory result of the increasing conversion of forests, savannahs, grasslands, and wetlands to cropland to grow the throughput required by food, feed, and biofuels entails the conditions of accelerating landscape denudation and ghg emissions from both land-use change and soils carbon oxidation.

One little understood factor is the role of soils in the sequestration of carbon. In fact, the amount of carbon stored in soils is far greater than that stored in vegetation. When forests are clear-cut, the soils are immediately exposed to erosion by wind and water, as well as to compaction, solar radiation, and desiccation, inducing the release of carbon into the atmosphere. The consequent soil degradation is reflected in a linear fashion in the degradation of cropland, inducing more deforestation and more soil perturbation. In the past half-century, 50 percent of world agriculture had been affected by erosion, nutrient depletion, biological degradation, and compaction due to massive loss of vegetation and the consequent soil agitation. The upshot has been doubling down on the conversion of more forests, savannahs, grasslands, and wetlands into cropland to make up for reduced soil fertility and falling crop production. This has come at the expense of further soil degradation. At the beginning of the new century, 38 percent of world agriculture, excluding permanent pastures and woodlands, was found to have been severely degraded. In all, 1.2 billion hectares of land were found to have been severely degraded and another 700 million hectares lightly degraded, leading to a loss of 75 billion metric tons of soil to erosion annually. As a result, 5–12 million hectares of cropland were abandoned every year since the 1960s due to soil degradation. Moreover, approximately 70 percent of the dry lands used for agriculture worldwide was deemed degraded and was on the verge of desertification by the turn of the twentieth century. It is estimated that soil degradation affects more than a billion people in 100 countries. Indeed, more than 135 million people could be forced to migrate elsewhere from their homelands due to soil degradation and desertification, with 60 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa alone. Between 1960 and 2000, 43 percent of Africa’s cropland and 70 percent of overall economic activity were severely affected by soil degradation and desertification. Notwithstanding this deplorable reality, the biofuel hawkers see Africa as the new green oil El Dorado. The demand for land in Africa in 2009 alone, punctuated by corporate land grabbing, was equal to the cropland expansion that occurred during the previous twenty years.⁵³

Against the backdrop of cropland degradation and the continuing competition between food, feed, and biofuels for new land resources, capitalists are moving to high-value ecosystems, exemplified by the grim state of peatland rainforests in Indonesia. The disruption of peat soils is particularly perilous because they consist of compressed and concentrated organic material, accumulated over centuries, and are supersaturated with carbon. Even though the area of peatlands worldwide covers 4 million square kilometers, representing only 3 percent of the earth’s surface, they store approximately 528 billion metric tons of carbon, equal to 75 percent of the carbon currently in the atmosphere. Notwithstanding the dangerous consequences of converting the peatland rainforests to oil palm plantations, Indonesian elites and transnational corporations have begun plundering this delicate ecosystem, largely prompted by growing European demand for biodiesel. When the government’s and corporate plans run their course, the area of peatlands and pristine rainforests converted to oil palm plantations in Indonesia will, by 2050, have grown from 9 million hectares in 2010 to 45 million hectares.⁵⁴

For transnational corporations, however, the plunder of natural resources like the peatland rainforests is the raison d’être of accumulation, which they rationalize by reference to greater economic growth, job creation, and foreign exchange earnings. Indeed, they never run out of rationalizations to justify biofuels. For example, when the 2007–08 global financial crisis drove home the ripple effects of the competition between food, feed, and biofuels, nearly simultaneous price hikes for staple food grains and oil seeds were enacted due to the diversion of substantial quantities of food crops to biofuels.

For the fossil resources industrial agriculture depends on for synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and fossil fuels, the biofuel peddlers and their intellectual minions refined their arguments. First, even though they partially conceded that there could be a conflict between food and fuel, they quickly adjusted their contention that such a problem could be one of management rather than scarcity. It was at this point that they brought on board the biotechnology gurus to supply more bio-rationalizations in defense of the supposed sustainability of biofuels. For the biotech companies, the “food versus fuel” debate now became a heaven-sent opportunity to penetrate the global food ecology. Presumably, genetic engineering of crops and plants could endlessly supply grains and plants that could satisfy the demand for food and green fuels without any impact on the global food ecology and global grain market. Second, when the evidence began to show the adverse relationship between food and biofuels, proponents began to argue in favor of second-generation biofuels, derived from agricultural and forest residues, nonedible plants such as eucalyptus, pines, poplars, and willows, and a vast mix of grasses. Although this book will cover their rationalizations in full in later chapters, several points must be clarified at this juncture.

First, the drive for biofuel production has already led to the ferocious expansion of giant monoculture plantations of soybeans, oil palm, sugarcane, jatropha, corn, cassava, sweet sorghum, sweet potato, and related bioenergy crops and plants, displacing tens of millions of subsistence farmers and indigenous peoples in the tropics and subtropics. The escalation of industrial monoculture has brought with it the urgency to convert forests, savannahs, and grasslands into arable land. Second, even though biotechnology corporations exuberantly and falsely try to reassure the public that biofuels derived from GE (genetically engineered) crops and GE trees would not only make the “food versus fuel” debate a non-issue but also contribute to the solution of global hunger, fuel shortage, and climate change, the recourse to GM of crops and plants under the mask of increasing production will likely be dangerous in the long run from the standpoint of both public health and biodiversity preservation. The commercial genetic manipulation of food crops aims at the homogenization of crops to make them responsive to inputs supplied by the same companies. Moreover, the use of genetically engineered trees for biofuel production and wood pellets is likely to lead to genetic contamination of native vegetation.⁵⁵

In summary, analysis of the ecological relations of production clearly indicates that biofuel production and pyrolysis-driven electricity generation are unsustainable. Limitless growth requires limitless supply of throughputs, but the earth’s capacity to supply them is limited. Concomitant with the geometric progression of industrial production during the twentieth century, the appropriation of biomass increased by a factor of 3.6 per year, the extraction of ores and minerals grew by 27, fossil fuels by 12, and construction materials grew by a factor of 34. Annual natural resource extraction and use soared from 5 billion metric tons in 1900 to 55 billion metric tons in 2000, and it is projected to increase to 100 billion by 2030 and 140 billion metric tons by 2050 as developing countries continue to play catch-up with advanced countries, in an effort to eradicate hunger and alleviate poverty. The commercial appropriation of natural resources and consumption have grown in parallel with the widening and deepening of neoliberal globalization, as seen in the fact that the global trade of raw materials grew from 5.4 billion metric tons in 1970 to 19 billion metric tons in 2005. The appropriation of natural throughputs in the quantities described above not only undermines the regenerative capacity of nature but also its waste absorption capacity, because the release of waste is proportional to the natural resources processed into goods and services. For example, the extraction and consumption of 140 billion metric tons of natural resources is projected to lead to the quadrupling of carbon emissions. Note that although the total global biocapacity in 2010 was 12 billion hectares, the world’s ecological footprint was 18.1 billion hectares, overshooting the ecology’s capacity to regenerate, much less to supply all the throughput demanded. This means that the world has been using the equivalent of the biocapacity of 1.5 planet Earths. By the turn of the twentieth century, three of the nine planetary boundaries requisite for a fully regenerative planet—biodiversity loss, climate change, and nitrogen cycle—were considered already crossed. And while the world today needs 1.5 Earths to meet the demands that the world is currently making on the only planet we have, three or four planets will be needed by 2050 to meet the projected increases in demand for natural resources.⁵⁶ So the deployment of overaccumulated capital to bioenergy crop and plant production to generate liquid biofuels and wood pellets could potentially push nature to a tipping point. The huge investments in large-scale industrial agriculture and monoculture tree plantations have already begun to erode the global forest ecology. The long-term effect of the loss of vast tropical forests relates to their impact on ecosystem dynamics, climate, carbon sequestration, and hydrologic cycle. The interpenetration of geo-ecological spaces and meteorological conditions amplifies the negative consequences of unrestrained expansion of natural resource exploitation into virtually all components of nature. It matters little whether the harm is done in any particular country; the effects will be felt throughout the biosphere. The complex interpenetration of geo-ecological spaces and hydrometeorological conditions is such that even the Amazon and Congo basin rainforests are interconnected through biogeochemical cycles and other bio-hemispheric processes, with profound implications for climatic conditions and precipitation regimes not only on each other but also on other regions. The two tropical regions are connected by the natural back and forth oscillation of atmospheric movements across the Atlantic Ocean. As a result, heavy rainfall and floods in the Congo basin coincide with droughts in the Amazon basin and vice-versa. Moreover, these precipitation patterns affect the climate and hydrology of other regions. For example, recent observations of these weather patterns indicate the annual deforestation of the Congo basin by 1.5 million hectares resulted in rainfall decrease in the Great Lakes region of the United States by between 5 and 15 percent; a similar impact had been discerned in Ukraine and some parts of Russia.⁵⁷

The invaluable extrapolation made from this record supports the conclusion that the 200 million hectares of tropical rainforests lost between 1950 and 1990 and the 427 million hectares of additional tropical forests that underwent significant degradation have had important bearings on local, regional, and global climate and rainfall patterns. To fully appreciate the centrality of tropical forests to climate regulation and carbon sequestration, it is useful to remember that, of the 670 billion metric tons of carbon stored in terrestrial vegetation, 86 percent is securely sequestered in the tropics and subtropics. When 100-year-old tropical trees are burned for energy or to make way for farms, they release their heavy loads of CO₂ rapidly. It will take 100 years to fully recapture the emitted carbon by growing their replacement. In the meantime, the CO₂ will still be in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, worsening climate change.⁵⁸

It is in conjunction with these ecological relations of production that we must assess the contributions of ecological economists to the consequences of the addition of biofuel production to the capital accumulation process. Contemporary ecological economists have certainly dented the neoclassical hold on the research community in the industrial countries in four critical ways. First, ecological economists have rightly pointed out that the earth is a thermodynamically closed system in that it cannot import matter from outer space nor can it export its waste material to outer space. In this sense, our planet is physically bounded. It thus stands to reason that ecological resources become the constraining factor in an economy that is a subsystem of the ecological system. The economy has no luxury to import low-entropy throughput from outer space or to export its high-entropy wastes outside its own sphere. This supposes that the thermodynamic and biological operations of our physical world can be sustained only when there is a correspondence between the levels of available physical stocks and levels of a population whose needs must be reasonably met. In Herman Daly’s formulation, long-term sustainability can be had only under steady-state conditions, in which the economy reflects the total available stocks of material wealth and the total population, all held constant at some desirable levels. This requires stringent limitations on the extraction of raw materials, such as allocation of quotas, and managed control of physical production and consumption as well as a planned population growth rate.⁵⁹ In other words, because the total basket of goods and services available to all people is a function of the physical environment’s ability to supply low-entropy throughput to continue production processes and to absorb the high-entropy wastes generated by those production processes, maintenance of the total natural resource stocks at the present level or above becomes the requisite condition for sustainable development, and constancy of total natural resource stocks and commensurate population size become the minimum conditions of assuring sustainable scale.⁶⁰ Curiously, the biofuel-biotechnology hucksters, when placed under pressure, grudgingly acknowledge that all this is true. However, they hasten to add that the biophysical limitations can be overcome by further reengineering nature.

Second, ecological economists view state intermediation as crucial for bringing about a balance between the demand of individual appropriators of natural stocks and the ecological system’s requirements for self-maintenance. To clarify this observation, economists Robert Costanza and Herman Daly, for example, differentiate between micro and macro allocations of ecological resources. Micro allocations are made by individual producers and consumers competing for goods and energy. Here, as individual producers and consumers compete to maximize their private benefits, there will be an overexpansion of the economy. Since natural resource stocks are vital resources held in trust by the collectivity for the benefit of present and future generations, macro or collective social decisions take precedence over private market decisions under the stewardship of the state. This is the reason why the state should have greater interest in the future of the ecological system than individuals because the integrity of the ecology and the stability of social existence of the collectivity are public goods, which only the state could provide.⁶¹

Third, ecological economists rightly contend that resolution of structural poverty is requisite for maintaining the integrity of the ecological system. This reasoning inheres in the contention that poor people have no stake in ecological conservation since their survival is based in the here and now. Given their wretched circumstances, the poor are likely to discount the present to the future. Therefore, it is in society’s long-term interest to ameliorate the living conditions of the poor. Just distribution and sustainability are the criteria by which both social justice and sustainable scale of the economy are measured. In a nutshell, societal demand for and nature’s ability to supply low-entropy throughput and sinks would not be in steady state unless a brake is put on limitless growth of resource extraction and sink utilization and unless there is just distribution of goods and services.⁶²

Finally, the contribution of ecological economists to unmasking the fetishism of gross domestic product (GDP) is difficult to exaggerate. By conveniently focusing on aggregate growth of the economy, measured in terms of GDP, neoclassical economists have long masked the costs of unfettered capitalist accumulation underlying GDP growth. For neoclassical economists, anything that does not produce exchange value has no value at all. Ecosystem services are typically taken by capital free of charge, and thus have no market value because dollars are not exchanged. They confine their measurement to the natural resources that produce goods such as timber and wood pulp for which there are markets, while ignoring the non-market services provided by trees before being cut down, such as pollination services, carbon sequestration, climate regulation, water purification, storm protection, and shoreline stabilization.

In an apparent effort to demystify the position taken by orthodox economists, ecological economists have struggled for a quarter-century to put a price tag on ecosystem services in ways that are understandable to the average person, even though putting a price tag on ecosystem functions is controversial. This is because commodification and privatization of these services are associated with the valuation exercise, since some market fundamentalists have already proposed payment for ecosystem services as a solution to resource overuse. After thoroughgoing examination of seventeen ecosystem service types from sixteen biomes, Robert Costanza and his colleagues put a price tag of $145 trillion on the services that humans derive annually from the ecosystem in terms of carbon sequestration, climate regulation, water production and purification, storm protection, erosion control, shoreline stabilization, pollination, waste absorption, and provision of suitable habitats to an array of terrestrial, marine and aquatic species. If the destruction and degradation of marine and terrestrial ecosystems that took place between 1997 and 2011 had been avoided, the valuation of global ecosystem services could have been $167 trillion per annum. In other words, we have lost $22 trillion worth of crucial ecosystem services between 1997 and 2011; the destruction of coral reefs alone may have cost the global economy $11.9 trillion during that period. For reference, the gross world product of the global economy in 2011 was $75 trillion.⁶³

There are also unavoidable abiotic consequences of industrial globalization, costs that are not captured by GDP. The dogged determination of capital to create a borderless world has indeed placed the fate of the biosphere on a precariously dangerous trajectory. The flows of global trade soared from $3 trillion in the early 1980s to $30 trillion in 2012, with no consideration of the environmental costs of the circulation of these goods. Almost all globally traded goods are transported by gigantic containerized cargo vessels crisscrossing the world’s oceans and seas, dumping all manner of refuse and toxic fuels along the way, without anyone monitoring what they do to vital parts of the biosphere. The global circulation of goods by sea increased from 228.3 million traffic equivalent units (TEUs) in 1994 to 627.5 million TEUs in 2013; this is equivalent to 150 million trailer-size containers carrying goods across the globe.⁶⁴

Can criticisms be made of modern ecological economics? Ecological economists are unreproachable in terms of their description of the connections between allocative efficiency, sustainable scale, and just distribution. Empirically, the market is ill-equipped to reveal the real non-market values of natural goods and services, much less to justly distribute them. Nor can the market tell us how much of the animal species, forests, and wetlands should be left intact to maintain ecosystem integrity. Additionally, since distributive equity and sustainable scale, by definition, are antithetical to the logic of capitalist accumulation, the market cannot address issues of equity and scale short of socially determined imposition of limitations and regulations on market operations. In keeping with the law of conservation of matter/energy, ecological economists are also right when they propose the paramount importance of prior determination of scale in resource extraction, since outflow of high-entropy wastes into the environment is proportional to the inflow of low-entropy throughput from the environment into the economy.

However, when it comes to prescriptions, contemporary ecological economics falters. In the first place, the supposition that stocks of material wealth and levels of populations can be maintained at some desired levels within the prevailing capitalist mode of production betrays objective understanding of how the logic of accumulation operates. The notion that steady-state conditions can be attained if people somehow temper their wants for the nearly infinite flow of goods and services smacks of religion, not of a materialist understanding of history. Because ecological economists hinge their prescriptions on ethics to tame the appetites of capital accumulators and consumers, the propositions forwarded to address issues of resource conservation, poverty eradication, and climate mitigation takes on quasi-religious overtones.

Their own class limitations have, perhaps subconsciously, made ecological economists steer clear of both the reactionary stagnation of the bourgeois order and the needed revolutionary transformation of it. Ecological economists forget that infinite expansion of accumulation is the heart and soul of capitalism. The prescriptive weakness of ecological economists stems from the general orientation they share with all bourgeois economists on the recognition of capitalism as a system without alternative and thus incapable of qualitative change. It can only be subjected to judicious modifications. This requires making bourgeois ethics guide the call for reform, meaning persuading corporations, states, and consumers to recognize the singular fact that there are limits to growth, that they should be willing to trade the prevailing productionist growth ideology for an earnest commitment to sustainable development, and that consumers of all classes ought to learn how to live within their means, combating conspicuous consumption and respecting nature. But if there is anything anathema to capitalist accumulation, it is the combination of ethics and limits to growth. A system whose raison d’être is predicated on continuous capital expansion cannot accommodate sustainable development. The call by ecological economists to redesign capitalism in such ways as to establish a thermodynamic balance between what is biophysically possible and what is ethically, socially, and psychically desirable smacks of romantic petty-bourgeois utopianism. An effective countervailing challenge to the dominant order can succeed only if there is clarity on the epistemological understanding of the true ontological status of a system that is called into question. What has made the prevailing social order so formidably resistant to change or substantial modification is that the mastery of the chieftains of industry and corporate intellectuals over the production, control, and dissemination of information that passes for authoritative knowledge reigns supreme.

Unfortunately, this romantic petty-bourgeois intellectualism inadvertently adds another layer of confusion to the contemporary discourse on change. This kind of scholarly disquisition and the proliferation of non-governmental organizations and intergovernmental institutions, mainstreaming the concepts of ecological economics to reform the productionist growth ideology, have simply fostered the creation of the romantic illusion that meaningful change can occur by modifying the prevailing social order. For example, fully internalizing the narrative and liberally appropriating the concepts of ecological economics, the UN Environment Program (UNEP) produced a lengthy monograph in 2011 titled Towards a Green Economy: The Pathway to Sustainable Development and Poverty Eradication. The document never mentioned, even in a sentence, the desirability or possibility of limiting capital accumulation as a way to address the impacts on resource depletion, environmental degradation, and atmospheric deterioration. Instead, the authors wasted page after page on the purported feasibility of a green economy consistent with a hyper-accelerating global capitalism in order to convince the reader and policy makers that limitless growth could be had if corporations and government adopt ecological modernization to promote eco-efficiency and eco-sufficiency, led by the market in resource extraction and circulation. The fanciful jargon used in this exercise is dubbed “decoupling,” that is, decreasing the metabolic rate of use of natural raw materials per unit of economic output. In other words, the use of less energy, raw materials, land and water resources to produce the same economic output would automatically result in eco-efficiency increases. The Pollyanna-ish consequences could be expressed as the simultaneous achievement of the goals of resource conservation, poverty eradication, climate mitigation, and green economic growth. Decoupling of natural resource use could also go hand-in-hand with negative impact decoupling, in which negative environmental impacts would decline in absolute terms, while green economic value is continuously being added.⁶⁵

Unfortunately, the presumed correlation of efficiency with resource use reduction has long been debunked. The nineteenth-century British economist William Stanley Jevons found that efficiency in resource production actually increased consumption of the resource.⁶⁶ It must be borne in mind that efficiency in bourgeois accounting means reduction in the cost of producing and supplying a given unit of goods and services, in which case this will have a perverse impact on consumer behavior. The supply of fuel-efficient cars means that people would drive more frequently and for longer distances. It is no accident that people drive more when gasoline prices are low and drive less when gasoline prices spike. Moving of goods around the globe more efficiently because of the technological revolution in transportation and communication has not led to less extraction and use of resources. On the contrary, the efficiency gains from the technological revolution have made it easier and cheaper for consumers to use resources and goods produced in distant lands by wasting huge energy on transporting these resources and goods. The $1.6-trillion-strong global tourism industry could not have grown to the degree it has without the proliferation of air-polluting airplanes that have made global travel the most convenient and affordable mode of modern transportation.⁶⁷ To develop a keen appreciation of the extent to which the notion of decoupling is hollow, consider the fact that 320–850 million hectares of additional forests, savannahs, and grasslands are projected to be converted to cropland by 2050 in order to produce the required feedstocks, food, and feed. Could the consequences of deforestation of this magnitude, accompanied by emissions from the manufacturing and use of synthetic nitrogen, pesticides, fuels, and other agrochemicals, be decoupled from GDP? Obviously, the answer is no; to admit otherwise would represent a scornful repudiation of basic physics. The evidence-free romantic conjectures manufactured by such as the UNEP is meant not to solve the looming dangers of poverty and climate change but rather to mask their legitimation functions of neoliberal globalization.

Finally, if the aspirational project of ecological economists is too utopian to have a long-term impact on the course of history, their account of history is even weaker, because ecological economists run into serious operational difficulty when it comes to the role of the state in the economy, where they envision Keynesian eco-managerialism. The error stems from the tendency to view the state as exterior to the process of accumulation. The state is presented as a neutral force, potentially capable of objectively generating and enforcing legislation and regulation to address questions of efficiency, equity, and scale. In this sense, they share with conventional economists the state-centric approach to resource conservation and environmental protection. They thus inadvertently entertain the illusion that overexploitation of natural resources and pollution of the ecological system could be avoided if the information gaps among stakeholders are closed through state intermediation. In their view, the state can bring about a broad consensus among producers, consumers, non-governmental organizations, and all other relevant actors on the essential values of sustainable scale, just distribution, and efficient allocation of resources. As some ecological economists have argued, the processes of consensus building, ecological integrative modeling, and adaptive management could close the gaps in information and understanding. This, in turn, would yield the desired institutional framework by shaping, modifying, or altering the behaviors and attitudes of all participants in the intellectual endeavor.⁶⁸

Let us look a little further at the ecological economists’ conception of the capitalist state. In the wake of the 1970s oil shocks, the oil oligopolies have succeeded in securing radical deregulation of the fossil energy sector in the United States, cushioned by numerous exceptions, loopholes, tax breaks, and subsidies. A look at Koch Industries will serve to show how deep the political reach of corporate capital is, especially that of the petrochemical industry.

The $115 billion Koch Industries is the second largest privately held corporation in the United States after Cargill, which means that it is the sole corporate fiefdom of Charles and David Koch. Operating in over sixty countries with about 100,000 workers, Koch Industries controls four oil refineries, six ethanol plants, a natural gas–fired power plant, and 4,000 miles of pipeline within the United States. The company has prospered no matter the president or the political party in control of Congress. The two brothers saw their wealth soar from $28 billion when Barack Obama assumed office in 2009 to $86 billion by the end of 2015.⁶⁹ What matters is their capacity to relentlessly defend the extremely deregulated hydrocarbon energy sector, and to wage open war against any effort to change it. For example, when the Environmental Protection Agency moved to regulate surface ozone emission from oil refineries, the high-powered Koch lawyers argued that the EPA failed to take into consideration the immense health benefits of smog because it blocks the sun, thus reducing skin cancer. Without smog, 11,000 additional cases of skin cancer would occur annually. Remarkably, the D.C. circuit court accepted the lawyers’ pro-smog arguments, even accusing the EPA of discounting the possible health benefits of ozone and overstepping its authority to regulate ozone levels. The judges had reportedly been participants in the seminars on law and economics organized by the Koch brothers.

The Koch Industries are major polluters, ranking third among the thirty worst polluters of air, water, and climate, after Exxon and American Electric Power. Its Georgia-Pacific paper mill alone was dumping more pollutants into U.S. waterways than General Electric and International Paper combined. Moreover, Koch Industries have generated more than 24 million metric tons of greenhouse gases annually. In 2012, Koch Industries was singled out to be the number-one producer of toxic waste in the United States, producing 950 million pounds of toxic chemical waste.⁷⁰

It is this mode of accumulation by emission/pollution that makes the Koch brothers the most ubiquitous and notorious warriors against the potential resurrection of the regulatory state in America. They are exemplary capitalists, setting the standard for shaping America’s domestic and foreign policy in relation to black carbon production and distribution. They have purchased the services of willing politicians, legislators, regulators, and judges to do their bidding, spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. Beneficiaries of the brothers’ largesse must be climate change deniers and unambiguous friends of “drill baby drillers” in order to qualify for unconditional support from the Koch brothers’ foundations and the synthetic front groups they finance. They have also mastered the dissemination of propaganda, internalizing Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the paramount importance of ideological and cultural hegemony in the perpetuation of the status quo. Institutions of higher learning have long been among their primary targets for ideological subversion. As of 2015, Koch foundations were subsidizing pro-market supremacy, pro-disciplinary neoliberalism, and anti-tax programs in 347 institutions of higher learning, including the resource-rich Ivy League universities. Their generosity comes with strings attached. When the Koch brothers contributed more than $965,000 to the creation of the center for free enterprise at Brown University, the string attached was that the Koch foundations would participate in the selection of professors. When the brothers helped fund the creation of a freshman seminar in free-market classics at the same university, the condition was the course would be taught by a libertarian professor. Additional funding was provided to Brown graduates to do research on why and how bank deregulation would be beneficial for the poor.⁷¹

To boost the production of sufficient intellectual materials, the Koch brothers themselves have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into the production and grooming of pro-market ideology scholars and researchers. Between 2007 and 2011 alone, for example, the Koch brothers gave $30 million toward the endowment of professorships, the underwritings of neoliberal economic programs, and the sponsorships of pro-market ideology conferences and lecture series. Think tanks and private policy institutions then repackage the intellectual output in a fashion that could be intelligible and accessible to the mass public. One of the most vociferous and prodigious manufacturers of Koch-inspired propaganda is George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, the premier outpost of neoliberal market ideology, funded by the Koch brothers. When George W. Bush became president, the Mercatus Center recommended fourteen of the twenty-three programs in the administration’s regulatory hit list, such as privatization of social security, further deregulation of taxes, deregulation of derivatives in energy, abolition of the EPA, ending the government-supported welfare system and Medicare. It was no accident that the Bush administration installed Susan Dudley from the Mercatus Center, notoriously known for her virulent anti-regulation credentials, as the top regulatory bureaucrat.

The Koch brothers have also been active in creating their own propaganda platform, organizing annual seminars on law and economics and other topics for judges, justices, senators, congressmen, scholars, and the super-rich. Even Supreme Court justices Scalia and Thomas partook of these seminars. Between 2003 and 2010 alone, 140 reactionary bourgeois foundations, spearheaded by Koch foundations, distributed $558 million to 91 different nonprofit groups, think tanks, trade associations, and academic programs to wage permanent warfare against groups that sought to promote climate change mitigation through the re-regulation of the black carbon sector, as well as to block progressive advocacy groups from gaining ground in electoral politics and democratic legislative representation.⁷²

The Koch brothers have never been short of corporate allies, especially in terms of promoting climate-change denial. Exxon, Chevron, and BP have all supported the construction of what we might call the climate change denial industrial complex. No fewer than 124 organizations have received money from Exxon-Mobil to describe climate science as “junk science” and environmental activists as charlatans and fanatics. These include the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, Hudson Institute, George Mason’s Law and Economics Center, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Frontier of Freedom Institute, the Reason Foundation, the George C. Marshall Institute, and many other groups with names that make them appear as though they are grassroots citizen organizations or academic bodies, such as the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Climate Change, the National Wetlands Coalition, the National Environmental Policy Institute, and the American Council on Science and Health.⁷³ Two of George C. Marshall Institute’s employees—the Institute received $630,000 from Exxon—wrote a long manifesto assisted by a Christian fundamentalist extolling the benefits of ghg emissions in these glowing terms:

As coal, oil and natural gas are used to feed and lift from poverty vast numbers of people across the globe, more carbon dioxide will be released into the atmosphere. This will help to maintain and improve the health, longevity, prosperity and productivity of all people.… We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide increase. Our children will enjoy an earth with far more plant and animal life than that with which we are now blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution.⁷⁴

Taking the Senate floor, James Inhofe, Republican senator from Oklahoma who then chaired the Senate Environment Committee, echoed the climate change deniers’ slogan in these terms: “The claim that global warming is caused by manmade emissions is simply untrue and not based on sound science. Carbon dioxide does not cause catastrophic disasters. Actually, it will be beneficial to our environment and our economy…. With all the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the funny science, could it be that manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people. It sure sounds like it.”⁷⁵

The Koch brothers and the black carbon oligopolies were not alone in their epic war to expand the privatization trajectory of sovereignty; they received perpetual reinforcement in their war against the potential return of the regulatory state, as well as against progressive pro-climate advocacy groups from other key constituencies. In particular, their alliance with agribusiness and biotechnology oligopolies had been strategic as the latter, too, had been obsessively preoccupied with defending the food manufacturing system from state regulation. Between January 1999 and June 2010 alone, the fifty largest agriculture patent holders, two of the biggest biotechnology corporations, and the agrochemical trade association together spent $572 million on lobbying Congress. In addition to using permanent in-house lobbyists, these oligopolies hired 13 former members of Congress and more than 300 former congressional and White House staffers to promote legislation in support of GM food and agricultural products or to block labeling such products. In 2010, these oligopolies had retained more than a hundred lobbying firms to descend on Congress.⁷⁶

These examples of the power of the fossil energy, agribusiness, and biotechnology oligopolies in American politics support the conclusion that no bourgeois reform, such as those ecological economists have proposed, could occur under the prevailing system in ways that would establish sustainable scale, allocative efficiency, and social justice. It appears that contemporary ecological economists are drawing on a past that is no longer relevant, a past in which Keynesian regulation of the market was embraced, largely as a result of working-class organizations and ruling-class fear of more radical change. We live now in a world of global corporations. The state’s autonomy, such as it was, has been severely compromised by capital’s global power. Interventions once possible no longer are. Capital will move away from them. It is no longer bound by national territories. In addition to having lost control over domestic industrial capital, the advanced capitalist countries could no longer avail themselves of the traditional means of geopolitics to have exclusive access to spheres of influence and domination in the Global South, because most corporations have already spread their assets across the globe. The metropolitan state now sees its primary function in how to capture the larger share of global accumulation as exporting more through an integrated global market. This requires the complete demolition of trade barriers to all goods and services including high-tech GM grains where the comparative/competitive advantages of the advanced capitalist countries lie. True, state intervention in the political economy, whether national or global, has not ceased, but the form has changed, decidedly in favor of accumulation and to the exclusion of labor. Now the state intervenes in the market to foster the hypermobility of capital and to redistribute tangible and intangible resources upwardly from the taxpayer to the giant corporations, as reflected in the rescue of the super-giant banks and hedge funds during the 2008 financial crisis. Other measures include gutting social protections and social safety measures, outsourcing public services, recommodification of national assets such as parks and natural wilderness. But most important are subsidies, courtesy of the taxpayer and justified under the guise of enhancing international competitiveness, making exports cheaper vis-à-vis other countries. In 1997, the Earth Council released a comprehensive study detailing how the world was annually spending $700 billion subsidizing corporations to overuse water in countries where water tables were falling, to deplete fishery resources at a time when seventeen oceanic fishing grounds were showing signs of exhaustion, and to encourage the production and use of coal and fossil fuels at a time when climate change and sea-level rise were in evidence. Startled by the extent of the abuse and misuse of public resources, the authors of the study expressed their revulsion in these terms: “There is something unbelievable about the world spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually to subsidize its own destruction.”⁷⁷

In essence, as geographers Deborah Cowen and Neil Smith correctly identified, the metropolitan state has now become a geo-economic social agent in the service of global corporations, resulting from the prevailing structural power of corporations, the total supression of the territorial logic of the state by the market logic of global functional integration, and the relative superannuation of geopolitics as a means of creating an exclusive constellation of client states.⁷⁸ In short, the market has completely and powerfully extricated itself from the state, and the state has been reduced to the sheer provision of enabling and legitimating services to the market.⁷⁹

Similar transformations have occurred in the Global South, where relative developmentalism has become dysfunctional. As a result, states in the South have become fully transnationalized and locked into the neoliberalized global trading system, freezing the historic global division of labor. They simply mimic metropolitan states in their attempts to induce the relocation of international capital. India offers an illustrative case. Hiding behind health concerns, in 1998 India banned the processing of oils from indigenous mustard seeds by small-scale operations and allowed free entry of foreign soybean oil. Prior to the ban, hundreds of thousands of mustard-oil processers were self-employed in rural India. Tens of thousands of small crushers used to convert locally produced mustard seeds into low-cost edible oils that accounted for 68 percent of processed oils in India. But when free imports of soybean oil became official policy, these small operations and the people who depended on them for livelihoods were no more. In addition, the free entry of soybean oil became a Trojan horse for the introduction of GM soybean cultivation as India permitted big land owners to begin GM soybean monoculture production following the ban on processing of local mustard oils.⁸⁰

The discussion in the preceding paragraphs supports the conclusion that there is no state intermediation to speak of under late capitalism to smooth over the contradictions between the logic of accumulation and the principles of sustainable scale, allocative efficiency, and social justice. The fundamental flaw in ecological economics stems from the failure to understand that questions of allocative efficiency, sustainable scale, and just distribution cannot be isolated from the political ecology of the capitalist mode of production.

The long-term project to save capitalism from its deepening internal contradictions necessitates reframing bourgeois ideology to generate at least the illusion of consent. In the 1980s, for example, corporate intellectuals were put to work to refurbish bourgeois ideology into what has come to be known as neoliberalism. The obsessive preoccupation of neoliberalism now focused on changing the states in the Global South so that corporations from the core capitalist countries could take over assets such as state-run telecommunications, public enterprises, public utilities, etc., under the guise of promoting efficiency, accountability, and transparency through privatization, deregulation, and trade liberalization. The methodology employed in the 1980s was to remove the barriers to further accumulation in the metropolitan North. With the typical state in the Global South now subordinated to the requirements of global capitalism, the focus shifted to expanding the scope and scale of primitive accumulation through the acquisition of agricultural lands, forests, savannahs, wetlands, grasslands, and water resources, under the guise of promoting bioenergy security, poverty eradication, job creation, and rural development. If advanced capitalist states are to thwart an “Occupy Wall Street” type mass movement from escalating to full-scale social revolution, they have to devise new coping strategies. These survival strategies now come in the form of what David Harvey termed accumulation by dispossession. This involves the dispossession of millions of rural producers of their ancestral lands, and commercially enclosing forest, wetland, and water resources, followed by privatization and monopoly control over these resources, considered foundational to primitive accumulation. Where Karl Marx saw primitive accumulation as the historical precondition of capitalism based on wealth derived from non-capitalist modes of production, necessary for providing the initial yeast, David Harvey sees primitive accumulation in the Global South under late capitalism as the dominant reorganizing principle of capital, acquiring semi-permanent features, because expanded reproduction within capitalist countries through technological innovations and the social engineering of mass consumption has become increasingly problematic. The deepening crisis of overaccumulation has become a frightening prospect. So, just as early capitalist commodity production came into existence through savage dispossession, expropriation, plunder, enslavement, commercial enclosure, and colonization, contemporary capitalism has come to rely on the same means for its continued existence—by appropriating, commodifying, and marketizing hitherto uncommodified natural resources in the Global South.⁸¹ In this view, accumulation by dispossession, i.e., the appropriation of land and other natural resources under contemporary capitalism, requires the savage expulsion of peasant producers, followed by the commodification and privatization of land and other natural resources, conversion of public properties to private corporate assets, and suppression of all forms of rights. This involves not only the commercial enclosure of nature but also the privatization of politics and culture in the sense that they serve to lubricate the deepening process of accumulation by dispossession. It logically follows that accumulation by dispossession is a politically driven process. Harvey hastens to add that if expanded reproduction (based on the exploitation of wage labor) was the dominant mode of accumulation between 1945 and 1973, accumulation by dispossession has become the primary mode of capitalist accumulation since the 1970s, involving the colonization of hitherto uncolonized social spheres in the Global South. The latter requires outright expropriation, predation, deception, intimidation, mass expulsion of peasants and violence—the primary object being the completion of the divorce of people from the means of production.⁸²

THE MANNER IN WHICH THE CONTEMPORARY land grab is taking place in the Global South supports the conclusion that accumulation by dispossession has become the primary contradiction of late capitalism. Since the commercial enclosure of nature in the advanced countries is almost total, the land and water resources to be stolen are primarily located in the Global South, mostly tropical Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, which are seen as the next sites for “green” oil and bio-based commodity production. The excitement in accumulation by dispossession has indeed led the biofuel-biotechnology industrial complex, global financial institutions, and corporate intellectuals to speculate that there are 445 million hectares of uncultivated land worldwide suitable for the cultivation of sugarcane, oil palm, soybeans, wheat, maize, and fast-growing, short rotation trees. Of this total, Africa is said to have 201 million hectares, Latin America 123.3 million hectares, and Southeast Asia 73 million hectares available for bioenergy and food production, enough to produce at least 245 exajoules (EJ) of energy a year by 2050. Other corporate analysts optimistically suggest that there could be as much as 2.2 billion hectares of land that could be devoted to tree plantations, perennial grasses, sugarcane plantations, and other bioenergy feedstock production with the capacity to generate many hundreds of EJ annually, replacing up to 27 percent of present global fossil energy consumption. This means conversion of at least 10 million hectares of land to bioenergy plantations every year until 2050 compared to the 4.5 million hectares of land that were put under crop cultivation every year between 1961 and 2007.⁸³

It is within this context that the exceptionally ruthless land grabbing that has been occurring in the Global South since the beginning of this century must be understood. According to various sources, between 2000 and 2010, approximately 227 million hectares of land deals were struck or were under negotiation between land resource–rich countries and a constellation of corporations, hedge funds, Arab petrostates, and Asian industrializing countries. Of the 1,217 land deals officially registered, involving 83 million hectares, between one-third and two-thirds are estimated to have been dedicated to feedstock and biofuel production. Of these 83 million hectares, 56.6 million hectares of land auctioned off were in Africa and were equal to the combined cultivated area of Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. By some estimates, the extent of land resources sold or leased to foreign land grabbers could feed 1 billion people. Sixty-two percent of the land deals were in Africa, a continent known for severe famine and hunger. The cruel irony is that of the bioenergy feedstocks and food crops grown on these stolen land resources are destined for export.⁸⁴

Insofar as the spectrum of biofuels production goes, a new map of bioenergy appears to be in the making. At the top of the hierarchy are the core biofuels countries controlling the supply of finance capital, biotechnologies, and organizational power. Countries in this category include the United States, Canada, members of the European Union, Japan, and Australia. Next come the intermediate biofuels countries, which are both recipients of finance capital and biotechnologies from the core and producers of biofuels in their own right. These are the classic semi-peripheral countries that have lately joined the G7 to form the G20, such as Brazil, Argentina, China, India, South Korea, Turkey, and South Africa. The intermediate biofuels countries occupy a strategic locus in the emerging global biofuels map, finding one of their feet in the core biofuels countries as recipients of finance capital and biotechnologies to develop their domestic biofuel industry, while they opportunistically fan the idea of south-south collaboration to ostensibly promote the collective interest of the Global South. This allows them to develop a Janus-like strategy to align their interests with those of the core biofuel countries to further their own biofuel industry and, at the same time, compete with the core countries in the periphery feedstock-supplying nations for biological resources. In the eyes of core countries and their corporations, the intermediate biofuel countries have credibility with periphery countries because of their public pretensions to speak on behalf of the amorphous Global South. In this, the intermediate biofuels countries supply the necessary bridge for the core to the periphery, and could be used as models to be emulated by the periphery. In the end, this boils down to the singular fact that both the core and intermediate biofuel countries are equal bio-vandalizers.

At the bottom of the biofuel hierarchy are periphery feedstock-producing countries, such as Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Ecuador, Bolivia, Cambodia, Laos, and Papua New Guinea, where capital accumulation by geoecological vandalization and human dispossession has been most pronounced. Most of the land deals made in these countries are shrouded in secrecy. In 2008 and 2009 alone, 80 million hectares of land had been auctioned off to foreign corporations and foreign governments with two-thirds of the land deals in Africa. For example, China signed a 2.8-million hectares land deal with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for oil palm plantations, while South Korea got sweet land deals of 700,000 hectares in North Sudan and the United Arab Emirates got another 750,000 hectares in the same country. More than a third of Liberia’s, 48.8 percent of the DRC’s, 21 percent of Mozambique’s, and 10 percent of South Sudan’s productive lands were auctioned off to TNCs, hedge funds, and sovereign wealth funds. Most of the grains and bioenergy feedstocks grown in these countries had been destined for export to advanced countries and emerging markets.⁸⁵ At the root of this new scramble for land resources has been the competition between food, feed, biofuel, and industrial tree plantation sectors.