Manuel B.

Coquet
March 31, 2015
Biofuels: Green or Brown?
One of the main issues that should not be overlooked in the Food System is
the role that biofuels will play in the following years especially with the
incoming subsidies from the 2014 Farm Bill. Biofuels are often shown as the
saviors of Green House Gases emissions in terms of energy production and
we praise Brazil and the US as examples to follow for their clean fuels. Today,
the Congress and the Obama administration are subsidizing billions of dollars
to producers of biofuels in different ways. These subsidies are not very clear,
and have expenditures increasing at least through 2022, ensuring that half of
the US Corn Production goes to biofuel production (Ford, 2010). The coming
of this biofuel industry is far away from a smooth transition into green energy
production but a means of production that could further detriment the
environment and sink down our food system. In order for biofuels to work,
they have to be sustainable and promote no carbon debt; sadly it doesnt
seem to be the case, and the possible consequences of carrying out this
biofuel expansion in a careless way covers a wide array of topics as we
currently live in a world where the food system is interrelated in every part of
our lives. In this paper we will examine biofuels, their promotion by the
government, the impacts they have in our current production models and
what their expansion means to us.
Subsidies in biofuels and crops like soybeans and corn are not new, they
started with the goal of making food cheap and were always led by political
interest. Nowadays almost 39% of subsidies go to corn and 0% goes to
organic produce.11 Subsidy supports are a testament to the power of the farm
lobby and its sway over Congress. Subsidies in the 2014 Farm Bill can be
broken down as direct biofuel production subsidies, which raise feedstock
prices for farmers by increasing the price of corn. For example, in the U.S.,
blenders are paid a 45 cent-per-gallon blenders tax credit for ethanol and
also the federal government also pays a $1 credit for plant-based biodiesel
and cellulosic ethanol. On the other hand, theres an indirect biofuel
production subsidy as a 54 cent-per-gallon tariff on imported biofuel to
protect domestic production from competition from other countries,
especially to prevent Brazilian sugarcane-based ethanol from entering U.S.
markets.4 The way money is spent by the government is hurting small
farmers, Americas economy, healthcare and promoting global warming
while making a few companies rich. The current environment of subsidies
can be well represented in Marion Nestles quote, We subsidize the basic
ingredients in processed foods. We do not subsidize fruits, vegetables, and
whole grains because the producers tend to be small producers. They dont
have the kind of political clout that the big commodity producers of corn and
soybeans and wheat that gets processed do.
It is unfair to criticize government subsidies without offering proof that they
are detrimental to the environment and citing only reasons of why they are
being made, which is why we must first understand what are biofuels and
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how they interact with the environment. Biomass is energy that comes from
plants as they capture and store the sun's energy whilst they grow. It can
come from a wide variety of crops, such as corn and soybeans, agricultural
leftovers, such as rice husks and pressed sugar cane, and wood. All this plant
material can be treated in different ways to produce energy and fuel. The
main ways are: burning them to produce heat or electricity, digested by
bacteria to create methane gas for powering turbines, "gasified" to break
down into a mix of gases that can be for further processing or fermented to
produce fuels, like ethanol (what the Congress is supporting). Advantages of
biomass are that unlike coal, biomass produces no harmful sulfur or mercury
emissions and has significantly less nitrogen - which means less acid rain,
smog and other toxic air pollutants. If biomass is sustainably managed,
converting it to energy can result in low or no net carbon emissions. Using
biofuels in our cars and airplanes can reduce global warming pollution
compared to common fossil fuels. Biomass has many sources, not
necessarily corn, and one promising example is switchgrass, and if planted in
a way that does not replace native habitat or take land out of food
production, switchgrass has the potential to reduce erosion and nitrogen
runoff, and increase soil carbon faster when mowed than when standing.15
Nonetheless, biomass energy is a tricky subject since it can be produced in
ways that reduce global warming pollution or in ways that increase it. It can
help clean up the air, water, and soil and protect wildlife, or it can degrade
our lands, forests, and water, threaten biodiversity, and harm public health. 14
The most harmful way of using biomass is burning it as it produces benzene
and other cancerigenous compounds and it isnt very efficient. In the
developing world, most of the times this is the only option and nearly 2.5
billion people continue to use traditional biomass fuels for cooking and
heating (IEA, 2009). Sadly, most of the biomass we use commercially today
comes from resources that are not sustainable. Over 90% of lands worldwide
have carbon debt18. We can therefore conclude that biomass is not being
used in a sustainable manner nowadays. In order for biomass to be
successful, we have to ensure that biomass energy is produced in ways that
become approach carbon sinks, protect the environment and do not increase
the price of food. In general, biomass energy should do the job better than
the fossil fuels it replaces. One way to make biofuels sustainable is to target
food surplus or to work in degraded areas, for instance it is not the same to
restore degraded farm lands in India for biofuels than to replace the tropical
rainforests of Brazil.
Michael Pollan defines "sustainable agriculture" as food production, which
does not undermine the conditions required for its own existence. 13 A simple
way to understand why biomass is not sustainable is to look at it from the
point of view that at its natural state biomass does follow a carbon neutral
cycle, but if any additional carbon is emitted in cultivating, harvesting and
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transporting the fuel, which can be considerable, is incremental to that and

creates a carbon debt. Also the carbon necessary to produce fertilizers,
pesticides and herbicides, must be taken into account. 2 Another reason why
this systems are not sustainable are soil erosion, the damage of monoculture
to the fertility of lands, the destruction of current environments for the new
acreage, the water problems it causes, the harmful effect in global
biodiversity and disruption in the interconnections between nature. 18 Global
loss of biodiversity affects ecosystem services (stability & function) and
human wellbeing in ways that we cant even begin to quantify.

The impacts of expanding biofuel production start with the "ecological

diseases" that arise with the intensification of food production. These
diseases can be subdivided in diseases of the ecotope, which include
erosion, loss of soil fertility, depletion of nutrient reserves, salinization and
alkalinization, pollution of water systems, loss of fertile croplands to urban
development, and diseases of the biocoenosis, which include loss of crop,
wild plant, and animal genetic resources, elimination of natural enemies,
pest resurgence and genetic resistance to pesticides, chemical
contamination, and destruction of natural control mechanisms. Under
conditions of intensive management, treatment of such "diseases" requires
an increase in the external costs to the extent that, in some agricultural
systems, the amount of energy invested to produce a desired yield surpasses
the energy harvested (Gliessman, 1997). Related are also issues with food
security and the environment with profound effects on water, the
eutrophication of our coastal zones from fertilizers, land use, and greenhouse
gas emissions. GMOs can lead to a whole new array of problems in biofuels,
although there is a lot of uncertainty of the effects that might be seen and
are out of the scope of this paper but attention should be paid to these
phenomena.
Moving into the social impacts that biofuels can bring, people are often
misinformed and too invested in media phenomenon like global warming that
often overlook how deforestation and ecosystem deterioration affect culture,
nutrition, farm labor inequalities16, the subsistence of small communities,
water sources, soil fertility, the beauty of nature, among others. People are
ignorant about the food system and where the energy they consume comes
from. Biofuels will increase the cost of land as more people will want to go
into that business and that will lead to increased producer costs in the
industries like hog, poultry, beef, restaurant, problems for organic produce
that will lead to bad nutrition and increase healthcare costs which affect
income and introduces society into the vicious cycle of our complex food
system.

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As Biofuels increase so will support for monocultures. This can be compared

to the growth of the sugar cane industry in America, where great quantities
of forests were wiped out in order to give birth to the farming of sugar cane
after the Spanish conquest in the islands of Barbados, Antigua and Tobago as
well as Brazil between the years 1516 and 1600. There is a lot of history on
the development of the sugar can industry and how the producers and the
owners of the means of production have been tied to the economic world
powers and modeled the world (sounds familiar to Congress and Lobbyists?)
that even UNESCO denoted sugar cane as the most important crop in the
world. The expansion of this crop brought with it labor, technology, habits,
history, forms of organization and the structure and social relationships of
production; nonetheless, it also had something to do with slavery, expansion
of the colored race around the world and the deterioration of many
ecosystems worldwide. Jumping a few years to the rise of the sugar industry
in Mexico in states like Nayarit or Veracruz, sugar cane expanded as sugar
industry was based in the Industria de Ingenios. These Ingenios are
government subsidized mills were sugar cane is processed into sugar and
later distributed to retailers and consumers. These industry further bolstered
the adoption of sugar can in small communities given that farmers would
have an income security since the government would buy their production
and it doesnt require much irrigation, pest control and fertilizing; it was seen
as easy money with low maintenance. Yet no one for saw the consequences
and implications that we see nowadays from this transition. First of all, sugar
cane is burnt and receives no crop rotation and therefore completely
destroys the land nutrients making it unfit for other crops. When it began
expanding more and more and trees were removed, water stopped reaching
the land and food plantations start changing from tropical climate with a lot
of vegetation like mango trees that assimilate a lot of CO 2 into a barren
subtropical climate. This led to towns losing their beauty, tourism, culture
and tradition, eating habits, small farmers being pulled out by bigger
farmers, water problems, mal nutrition and food security issues since people
werent consuming the sugar cane. This may seem like a disconnected story
but thats exactly what the biofuel industry is already doing nowadays.
We talk about biofuels replacing fossil fuels but up to what extent. How big is
the impact biofuel energy can have in US energy consumption? To answer
the question, In 2006, nearly 19 billion liters of ethanol were produced on
20% of U.S. corn acreage. These 19 billion liters represents only 1% of total
U.S. petroleum use. However, even if we completely ignore corn ethanols
negative energy balance and high economic cost, we still find that it is
absolutely not feasible to use ethanol as a replacement for U.S. oil
consumption. If all 341 billion kg of corn produced in the U.S. were converted
into ethanol at a rate of 2.69 kg per liters of ethanol, then 129 billion liters of
ethanol could be produced. This would provide only 7% of total oil
consumption in the U.S. (Pimentel, 2008). This naturally leads to ask us if
biofuels are really a solution to green house gases emissions and energy
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consumption in the US if they only impact 7% of the sources and to wonder

how much land is needed to really make it significant. Targets by Congress
roam around the 10-15% of US energy consumption, which is still very low
and already affects new ecosystems.

Finally, several studies have dedicated to study the impact of emissions of

biofuels and have recently included greenhouse gas emissions due to
indirect land use change of expanding agricultural areas dedicated to biofuel
production. They mainly focus in addressing the issues of deforestation,
irrigation water use, and crop price increases due to expanding biofuel
acreage. One of the models is GLOBIOM an economic partial equilibrium
model of the global forest, agriculture, and biomass sectors with a bottom-up
representation of agricultural and forestry management practices. The
findings of GLOBIOM are that biofuel expansion creates a complex system of
not only positive but also negative effects/externalities. Biofuel production
can either be associated with a net carbon sink through land use change, or
it may increase net deforestation drastically and create a carbon debt for
more than 20 years. For it to be a net carbon sink cannot be obtained
through a general biofuel mandate because it is accompanied by bioenergy
costs twice as high as the second outcome (carbon debt), and thus would be
avoided by the industry. The main issue that needs to be paid attention to is
forest ecosystem and the food price increase that will not benefit the poorest
populations without appropriate public action.6 Another study is the one
made by (Searchinger, 2008) predicts that corn-based ethanol, instead of
producing a 20% saving in green house gases emissions, nearly doubles
them over 30 years and has an increase for 167 years. With this information
in hand we need to be more conscious and demand answers and actions
from our politicians and push towards a more sustainable planet which
cannot be done solely by subsidies in biofuels.

References
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<<http://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/2014/03/11/obamas-2015budget-backs-costly-corn-ethanol-subsidies>>
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Boulder, 1995.
3. Bittman, M. and Patel, R. The Long Green Revolution. Edible Education 101: The
Rise and Future of the Food Movement. Lecture conducted from Berkeley Food
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Environment 360, 2010.

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<<http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_case_against_biofuels_probing_ethanols_hidden_
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