Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
agro-industrialization premised on land-grabbing, displacement of small producers,
and increased emission of carbon (deforestation) and nitrous oxide (inorganic fertil-
izer). he privileging of exhange-value over use-value ('ecological capital' including
farming knowledge) subordinates agriculture to a financial calculus at the expense
of socioecological sustainability.
As suh, the biofuels revolution condenses some critical thresholds in global
political-economy. These include, first, the substitution of fuel crops for food crops
- signalled by critics renaming biofuels 'agrofuels'; second, the 'financial turn', as
speculative investments drive the development of an agrofuels project; third, the
global land-grab, as governments conspire with development agencies and investors
to enclose land for food and energy plantations; and fourth, the consolidation of a
process of capital involution, as the expanded reproduction of capital depends on the
centralization of agro-industrial capital via cycles of social exclusion. The latter pro-
cess, normalized as 'development', is clearly represented in the agrofuels project -
the subject of this hapter.
The agrofuels project
The recent emergence of
industrial
biofuels, with subsidies and cross-sectoral and
speculative investment, amounts to a coordinated 'agrofuels project' (McMihael,
2009b), targeting land in the global South. In 2007, the US government set corn eth-
anol targets (35 billion gallons by 2017) with huge subsidies to the agribusiness gi-
ants suh as ADM, Bunge, and Cargill. he European Union mathed this with a 10
per cent target by 2020 for a biofuels mix in transport fuels. The UK Gallagher Re-
port (2008) estimated that by 2020 about 500 million more hectares of land, one-third
more than currently under cultivation, would be required to meet global demand for
biofuels. To accomplish this, not only would 70 per cent of European farmland need
conversion to fuel crops, but also the entire US corn and soy harvest (Holt-Giménez,
2007a). However, arable land prices in the US rose 13 per cent in 2007, and over 10.5
per cent in 2008; while in the UK prices rose 28 per cent in late 2007, and by more
than 10 per cent in the first quarter of 2008 (Berthelot, 2009, p16). And so, given (sub-
sidized) biofuel targets
and
enabling Kyoto protocols, corporations and financiers are
increasingly investing in agrofuels, production offshore - as depicted in
Table 5.1
,
recording venture capital investments in biofuels for 2009.
Table 5.1
Biofuel investments by country, 2009
