Vandana Shiva: Full Tanks or Empty Stomachs?

[nosmokes]

It would be to our benefit to listen to and heed the wise words of Miss Shiva.
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original-chinaconfidential.

Monday, December 31, 2007

The Last Word (for 2007) on Biofuels and Hunger

The promotion of biofuels based on corn and soy, palm oil and jatropha is a false solution to climate change.

So says Vandana Shiva, one of India's leading physicists, who is also widely considered to be one of the world's leading authorities on the environment and women's rights. The author of Biopiracy: the Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, Shiva directs the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy in New Delhi. Her current work centers on biodiversity and sustainable agriculture. She is a Slow Food international vice president.

Excerpts from her essay, "Food, Forests, and Fuel," in Share the World's Resources, appear below. Following articles that China Confidential has published by scientists, environmentalists, energy experts, and other analysts, her piece again illustrates that opposition to biofuels cuts across social, economic, and ideological lines. Except for the heads of the agribusiness industry, a relative handful of wannabe biofuels barons, and the politicians pushing mandates and subsidies for biofuels in the name of clean energy and energy independence, there is an emerging global consensus that biofuels are at best a boondoggle or a scam; at worst, a genocidal menace--masked in green.


Biofuels, fuels from biomass, continue to be the most important energy source for the poor in the world. The ecological biodiverse farm is not just a source of food; it is a source of energy. Energy for cooking the food comes from the inedible biomass like cow dung cakes, stalks of millets and pulses, agro-forestry species on village wood lots. Managed sustainably, village commons have been a source of decentralized energy for centuries.

Industrial biofuels are not the fuels of the poor; they are the foods of the poor, transformed into heat, electricity, and transport. Liquid biofuels, in particular ethanol and bio-diesel, are one of the fastest growing sectors of production, driven by the search of alternatives to fossil fuels both to avoid the catastrophe of peak oil and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. President Bush is trying to pass legislation to require the use of 35 billion gallons of biofuels by 2017. M. Alexander of the Sustainable Development Department of the FAO (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization) has stated: "The gradual move away from oil has begun. Over the next 15 to 20 years we may see biofuels providing a full 25 per cent of the world’s energy needs."

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complete article here