Genomics and Society: Reinventing Life? - Sustainable Biofuel Development

Initially heralded as a ‘green’ alternative to fossil fuels, the sustainability of biofuels has recently been challenged in relation to both social and environmental impacts. Initiatives to promote sustainable biofuel development are taking many forms, including consensus-seeking roundtables to develop sustainability criteria, and the use of biotechnology to develop more efficient and environmentally friendly biomass crops and biofuel conversion processes. In this session, the speakers will consider different ways of framing and assessing the issue of biofuel sustainability, and explore the consequences for developing biofuel technologies.

Session Chair: Chandrika Nath, UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology

Renewed interest in biofuels has been motivated by a number of concerns, including high oil prices, energy security, and the effects of climate change. Although the use of biomass has many arguments in its favour, the possible negative social and environmental implications threaten to obscure its development.

In order to achieve EU biofuel targets in the near- to medium-term, it seems that importing significant quantities of biofuels will be necessary. World regions with sufficient biomass resources to impact EU fossil energy demand are Asia, Africa and South America. However, such large-scale use of biofuels must also guarantee environmental sustainability and an overall reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In Europe, a number of initiatives are attempting to design systems that will ensure GHG savings and the environmental sustainability of biofuels. These include the UK’s Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO), the Cramer report in the Netherlands, and initiatives in Germany. Other international organisations (for example, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, and the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels) are also working towards mechanisms for ensuring sustainable biofuel production.

This paper presents a framework that reviews and assesses the main sustainability issues implicated in the use of biomass resources for biofuel production. The aim of this analysis is to ensure that biofuel production is associated with regional or local development, the improvement of local conditions, and the use of ‘traditional’ environmental management tools.

Biofuel crops have recently become a focus of controversy regarding claims for societal benefits such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, providing energy security, and enhancing rural livelihoods. Critics have denounced current biofuel crops as unsustainable, causing social, economic and environmental harm in the global South. At the same time, remedies are being promised from more efficient, ‘next-generation’ biofuels, especially with novel GM crops. Can biotech bring us benign biofuels?

Harm from biofuel crops is often portrayed as a negative side-effect, as if it were incidental and readily avoidable. In the global South, however, current harm results fundamentally from agri-industrial monocultures producing standard commodities for global markets. Land use becomes linked with global energy prices. This production-market system aggravates prior conflicts over land use, in ways that further dispossess communities of control over resources. An ‘integrated biorefinery’ is designed to convert any biomass source into diverse industrial products; for example, animal feed becomes a by-product of biofuels.

In this global market context, GM crops are being designed to extract bioenergy in more diverse ways, for example by protecting agri-industrial monocultures from yield loss, by facilitating breakdown of cell walls into biomass, by extending crop cultivation to ‘marginal’ land, by recycling ‘waste’ material, etc. More and more resources are called ‘marginal’ or ‘waste’, as if they had no other societal uses. Biotech innovations have political-economic drivers similar to the causes of current harm from biofuels. With novel techniques or crops that enhance productive efficiency, the financial incentives for extending agri-industrial monocultures become greater, extending the current harm.

Seemingly in the blink of a policymaker’s eye biofuels have shifted from being a technology that could help deal with problems associated with global warming, rural poverty and access to energy, to being a ‘crime against humanity’ according to the UN special rapporteur on the right to food. While it is not unusual for contrary and contested positions to develop over the use of technology in developing countries it is unusual for such a broad reversal of opinion to occur. Development policy, by its nature, tends to stabilise policy positions and by extension promote particular outcomes. This process has not occurred in support of biofuels. This paper argues that because biofuels as a developmental option offer particularly complex solutions, engaging with multiple increasingly globalised systems in ways we cannot yet fully understand, the apparatus and institutions that develops policy discourses are unable to produce policies and positions that either articulate, promote or interrogate biofuels as a developmental tool.