January 20, 2009

by Teresa L. Debuque

Resource-hungry nations are snapping up huge tracts of agricultural land in poor Asian nations, in what activists say is a “land grab” that will worsen poverty and malnutrition.

Global trends including high prices for oil and commodities, the biofuel boom and now the sweeping downturn are spurring import-reliant countries to take action to protect their sources of food.

China and South Korea, which are both short on arable land, and Middle Eastern nations flush with petrodollars, are driving the trend to sign up rights to swathes of territory in Asia and Africa.

In the Philippines, a series of high-profile deals has clashed with long-running demands for agrarian reform, including land redistribution.

The Department of Agrarian Reform said in 2007 it was looking at large tracts of land for agribusiness development under a memorandum of understanding signed with China. The memo calls for the development of land to grow hybrid corn, rice and sorghum.

Because of protests, the Department of Agriculture suspended plans to allow China to use 1.24 million hectares of Philippine agricultural land.

“It will aggravate the problem of landlessness, the insufficiency of land for Filipino peasants,” Anakpawis party-list Rep. Rafael Mariano said of the land deals.

November 1, 2008

by Teresa L. Debuque

Camilla Moreno, Brazilian land rights activist and prominent critic of agrofuels, warned the Philippine Government against following Brazil’s lead in converting land which is meant for food production toward the propagation of agrofuel crops to feed developed countries’ growing demand for this commodity. At a forum held on October 28, 2008 in Quezon City, Philippines, and co-sponsored by SEARICE and the Third World Network (TWN), Moreno argued that the movement toward using agrofuels is not the ideal solution to global warming, which has been blamed on fossil fuels that agrofuels are meant to replace. She emphasized that the often irrational use of energy which globalized trade has fostered is at the root of the world’s unsustainable demand for fuel, and that replacing one kind of fuel with another would not make a dent on the problem, but rather, create new ones.

Ethanol production in Brazil

Camilla cited the problem of “agro-transition,” which is taking place all over Brazil. Brazil, which used to be the world’s biggest producer of oranges and other food commodities, has in recent years converted millions of hectares of land for the production of fodder crops for ethanol, such as soy, corn, and sugar. Of Brazil’s total land area of 350 million hectares, 21 million hectares are planted to soy; 40 million hectares, to corn; and 7.2 million hectares, to sugarcane (half of which output would be used to produce ethanol).

Deforestation has resulted from such large-scale land conversion. Sao Paulo state, the major industrial and economic powerhouse of the Brazilian economy, and touted as “the ethanol capital of the world,” is completely deforested, Moreno reported. Soy and jatropha plantations have taken a large chunk out of the Amazon Rainforest, and further incursions into the latter are taking place to this day. Mato Grosso, Brazil’s third largest state, used to be thickly forested since half its area is covered by the Amazon forest, has largely been burned down to make way for soya production.

Agrofuels are manufactured from biomass and from the by-products of large-scale crop plantations and agro-industries. There are two types of agrofuels, namely, ethanol and biodesel. Ethanol can be manufactured from three types of raw materials: (1) crops with high sugar content (glucose, saccharose), such as sugarcane and sweet sorghum; (2) crops with rich starch content, such as maize, wheat, barley, cassava and rice; (3) materials rich in cellulose, such as wood and agricultural residue (this is the “next generation” agrofuels). The “next generation” agrofuels is not yet commercially available. Biodiesel in turn comes from oil crops, such as rapeseed, palm, moringa, coconut, and jatropha, among others.

A video coverage of a presentation by SEARICE executive director Wilhelmina "Ditdit" Pelegrina on Agrofuels, at the "Crops, Cars and Climate Crisis" discussions in Saskatoon, Winnipeg and Ottawa, Canada on 27 April to 2 May 2008.

[View video]