BIOFUELS AND THE FINANCIALIZATION OF THE GLOBAL FOOD SYSTEM - Food Systems Failure - page 89

also about biophysical process. The conditions of fungibility are also premised on
'biophysical override' (Weis, 2007) - a condition of disregard for, or 'externalization'
of, environmental consequences.
It is at this moment that the limits of agro-industrialization become not simply
material (and social) but also epistemic. This is the unassailable interpretation of
UN Human Rights rapporteur Jean Ziegler's claim in 2007 that biofuels are a 'crime
against humanity' — insofar as they undermine food-provisioning cultures, and de-
grade environments (increasing emissions, 31 with further degradation). In short,
agrofuels fundamentally contradict the meaning of social reproduction. The epistem-
ic point is that while agrofuels may be rational in terms of an investment portfolio
(especially with massive public subsidies), they contradict planetary and human sus-
tainability. Encouraged by an artificial 'market calculus', they are nevertheless so-
cially, economically 32 and ecologically irrational. Agrofuels are not only water-in-
tensive, 33 but they accelerate the export of water from the global South, embodied in
agro-exports - exemplified by the participation of Middle Eastern countries in land-
grabbing.
The social irrationality is that agrofuels increase emissions, cannot solve the en-
ergy crisis, and threaten existing common-lands, prairies and forests upon whih a
large portion (and ultimately all) of humanity depends. Of course, some smallhold-
ers gain access to additional income from leasing part of their land, or contracting
with biofuel traders/processors (McMihael, 2010). But this is most likely a short-
term phenomenon, ultimately entrapped in the development metric, reinforcing an
unsustainable trajectory. What may be partial success in conventional rural devel-
opment terms discounts the inability of agrofuels to solve the global energy crisis,
let alone the crisis associated with marginalization of smallholders, pastoralists and
forest-dwellers. At the same time, it discounts the fundamental importance of biod-
iversity preservation for planetary survival. Development entrapment means ignor-
ing, discounting and marginalizing extant practices that have the potential to reduce
energy profligacy, fossil-fuel dependence, and reorganize social life around suh con-
crete and sustainable trajectories as food and energy sovereignty (Witman, Des-
marais and Wiebe, 2010).
A global biofuels market is still incipient (Wilkinson, 2009), as neo-mercantilist
practices (protected, subsidized national biofuel sectors, with offshore complements
managed through tariff structures) continue alongside emergent globalizing cor-
porate/state arrangements - whih anticipate a world biofuels market by virtue of