Agrofuels, Food Sovereignty, and

the Contemporary Food Crisis

Bulletin of Science,
Technology & Society
Volume 29 Number 3
June 2009 189-193
2009 SAGE Publications
10.1177/0270467609333733
http://bsts.sagepub.com
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com

Peter Rosset
Center for the Study of Rural Change, Ceccam, Mexico
In this article, agrofuels are examined in the context of the world food price crisis and the food sovereignty proposal for addressing the crisis. Both short- and long-term causes of the crisis are examined, and while agrofuels are
presently not a prime causal factor they are clearly contraindicated by the crisis. Food sovereignty, including a
moratorium on agrofuels, is argued to offer the best option for managing the crisis.
Keywords:

agrofuels; biofuels; food crisis; food prices; food sovereignty; Via Campesina

Wail, O ships of Tarshish, for Tyre is laid waste,

without house or harbor!
From the land of Cyprus it is revealed to them.
Be still, O inhabitants of the coast; the merchants of
Sidon, who cross the sea, have filled you.
And on many waters your revenue was the grain of
Shihor, the harvest of the Nile; you were the merchant of the nations.
Be ashamed, O Sidon, for the sea has spoken, the
stronghold of the sea, saying: I have neither labored
nor given birth, I have neither reared young men nor
brought up young women
Who has purposed this against Tyre, the bestower of
crowns, whose merchants were princes, whose traders were the honored of the earth?
The Lord of hosts has purposed it, to defile the
pompous pride of all glory . . .
At the end of seventy years, the Lord will visit Tyre,
and she will return to her wages and will prostitute
herself with all the kingdoms of the world on the face
of the earth.
Her merchandise and her wages will be holy to the
Lord. It will not be stored or hoarded, but her merchandise will supply abundant food . . . for those who
dwell before the Lord.
Isaiah 23
In the current global context we are confronting the
convergence of the food crisis, the climate crisis, the

energy crisis and the financial crisis. These crises have

common origins in the capitalist system and more
recently in the unrestrained deregulation in various
spheres of economic activity, as part of the neoliberal
model, which gives priority to business and profit. In
the rural zones of the world, we have seen a ferocious
offensive of capital and of transnational corporations
(TNCs) to take over land and natural assets (water,
forests, minerals, biodiversity, land, etc.), that translates into a privatizing war to steal the territories and
assets of peasants and indigenous peoples. This war
uses false pretexts and deliberately erroneous arguments, for example to claim that agrofuels are a solution for the climactic and energy crises, when the truth
is exactly the opposite. Whenever peoples exercise
their rights and resist this generalized pillage, or when
they are obliged to join migrant flows, the response is
always more criminalization, more repression, more
political prisoners, more assassinations, more walls of
shame, and more military bases. (Declaration of
Maputo, La Via Campesina, October 23, 2008)1

Agrofuels must be considered within the context of

the world food price crisis if we are to evaluate their
likely impact, and we should judge their compatibility
with food sovereignty, proposed by farmer organizations, as the solution to the food crisis. In fact, in
todays world, we not only face a food crisis but
rather interlocking crises of the climate, energy, food,
and finances. All of these crises are products of the
world capitalist system and neoliberal deregulation of
markets. Agrofuels are related to all facets of this multidimensional crisis. They have been posited as the

Authors Note: Address correspondence to Peter Rosset, Apartado Postal 131, San Cristbal de las Casas, Chiapas, 29200 Mexico;
e-mail: [email protected].
189
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solution to the energy and climate crisis, dubious

claims that are addressed elsewhere in this issue, and
they certainly are part of the financial crisis. After
the mortgage crisis, investors needed a new place to
put their money. So they pumped it into commodities,
farmland, and the new biofuels boom . . , according
to the Institute for Food and Development Policy and
other analysts (Gordon, 2008; Shattuck, 2008).

The World Food Price Crisis

and Food Sovereignty
It is the relationship of agrofuels with the food
price crisis that I examine in this article. In todays
world we find ourselves mired in a global food price
crisis that is driving increased hunger and even food
riots in several continents. It seems odd that we are in
crisis of high food prices, when the past 20 to 30 years
have seen a crisis of low prices, prices so low that
millions of peasants and family farmers around the
world were driven off the land and into national and
international migrant streams. To confront that harsh
reality, La Via Campesina, the international alliance
of organizations of peasant and family farmers, farm
workers, indigenous people, landless peasants, and
rural women and youth,2 developed a comprehensive
alternative proposal for restructuring food production
and consumption at the local, national and global
level, called food sovereignty (Rosset, 2006).
Under food sovereignty, and in contrast to the one
size fits all proposals of the World Trade Organization
(WTO), every country and people is deemed to have
the right to establish its own policies concerning its
food and agriculture system, as long as those policies
do not hurt third countries, as has been the case when
major agroexport powers dump foodstuffs in the markets of other countries at prices below the cost of
production, thus driving local farmers out of business
(Rosset, 2006). Food sovereignty would allow countries to protect their domestic markets against such
practices. But now that we have shifted from a period
of artificially low prices, to a period of high prices, or
more accurately, more volatile prices, does food sovereignty still make sense? An examination of the
causes of the current crisis, which turn out to be not
so different from the previous crisis, shows that it
indeed does. In fact, food sovereignty may well offer
our only way of the current conundrum.
But, what are the causes of the extreme food
price hikes?3 There are both long-term and shortterm causes. Among the former, the cumulative

effect of three decades of neoliberal budget cutting,

privatization, and free trade agreements stands out.
In most countries around the world, national food
production capacity has been systematically dismantled
and replaced by a growing capacity to produce
agroexports, stimulated by enormous government
subsidies to agribusiness, using taxpayer money
(Rosset, 2006).
It is peasants and family farmers who feed the
peoples of the world, by and large. Large agribusiness
producers in most any country have an export vocation. But policy decisions have stripped the former
of minimum price guarantees, parastatal marketing
boards, credit, technical assistance, and above all,
markets for their produce. Local and national food
markets were first inundated with cheap imports, and
now, when transnational corporations (TNCs) have captured the bulk of the market share, the prices of the
food imports on which countries now depend have
been drastically jacked up (Rosset, 2006).
Meanwhile, the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund have forced governments to sell off
their public sector marketing board and parastatal
enterprises that maintained grain reserves (Rosset,
2006). The result is that we now face one of the tightest
margins in recent history between public food reserves
and demand, which generates both rising prices and
greater market volatility. Food inventories are now
largely in the hands of the private sector, usually foreign corporations, which behaves in an inverse fashion
to the public sector when a crisis emerges. As prices
rise, private merchants withhold stocks from markets,
in order to artificially drive prices higher before selling. This is hoarding and speculation, and has been
the modus operandi of private grain merchants from
biblical times to present-day companies such as
Cargill, Archers-Daniels-Midland, and Bunge. This
was the case with the so-called tortilla crisis in
Mexico in 2007 (Hernndez Navarro, 2007). The
public sector, on the other hand, does the reverse,
releasing stocks as prices rise in order to ameliorate
price hikes and allow the poor to continue eating, thus
averting famine. Although parastatal grain marketing
boards were corrupt and inefficient in many cases,
selling them off has proven to be a cure worse than
the disease; they should have been reformed instead
(Rosset, 2006).
In other words, many countries no longer have
either sufficient food reserves or sufficient productive
capacity. They now depend on imports, whose prices
are first skyrocketing, then dropping, then perhaps skyrocketing again. Another long-term cause of the crisis,

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Rosset / Agrofuels and Food Crisis 191

though of far lesser importance, has been changing

patterns of food consumption in some parts of the
world, like increased preference for meat and poultry
products (Ray, 2008).
Among the short-term causes of the crisis, by far
the most important was the relatively sudden entry of
speculative financial capital into food markets (followed by their at least partial exit). Hedge, index, and
risk funds have invested heavily in the futures markets
for commodities like grains and other food products.
With the collapse of the home mortgage market in the
United States, their already desperate search for new
avenues of investment led them to discover these markets for futures contracts. Attracted by high price volatility in any market, because they take their profits on
both price rises and price drops, they bet like gamblers
in a casinogambling, in this case, with the food of
ordinary people. These funds injected an additional 70
billion dollars of extra investment into commodities,
inflating a price bubble that has pushed the cost of
basic foodstuffs beyond the reach of the poor in country after country. More recently, commodity prices
have begun to drop, as the funds have been hard hit by
the financial crisis, although the most likely scenario
now is that prices will follow wild swings as derivative investors bet on both up- and down-swings. When
crop commodity prices rise, consumer prices follow
suit, but when commodity prices drop, consumer
prices stay high, thus hurting both farmers and consumers. Furthermore, farmers scarcely benefited when
prices rose, as most of their harvests were sold at
lower prices and thus grain-trading corporations made
windfall profits (see the excellent analysis of these
phenomena by Hernndez Navarro, 2008).
The major global price increases in the costs of
chemical inputs for conventional farming, particularly fertilizers, as a direct result of the high price of
petroleum, were also a major short-term causal factor
(although oil and fertilizer prices began to fall more
recently). Other factors of recent impact include
droughts and other climate events in a number of
regions, and a tendency of TNCs to export needed
foodstuffs from certain countries in search of better
prices, exacerbating local shortages.

Agrofuels in the Context

of the Food Crisis
There is no doubt that the agrofuel boom is a contributing factor in the food price crisis. Although not
yet a dominant causal factor (so far these have been

Figure 1
Rice Importation by the Philippines (1984-2008)
in Thousands of Metric Tons (After Freedom
from Debt Coalition, 2008)

the dismantling of productive capacity, privatization,

hoarding, and speculating with reserves, trade liberalization and the role of speculative financial capital),
demand for agrofuels can only exacerbate the crisis.
We can use the Philippines as a case in point. The
Philippines has an estimated 4 million hectares
planted to rice, the basis of the national diet, with an
average yield of 3.68 tons per hectare. Yet the
Philippines produces only 85% of its rice requirements, importing the rest. In fact, the Philippines is
facing an escalating crisis of import dependency, as
depicted in Figure 1, but by late 2007, the government
had committed 2.2 millions hectares of farmland to
agrofuel production, more than half the rice area
(SEARICE, 2008). Meanwhile, the price of rice has
been rising since 2001, with a 12% hike in 2007, and
a 60% jump between January and April of 2008. By
April of 2008, the price of rice was about US$1 per
kilogram, while millions of the countrys urban poor
earn less than US$2 per day (SEARICE, 2008). It is
impossible to examine this and similar cases around
the world and not see the inevitable negative impact
of agrofuels on the food crisis.
Of course, governments such as those of the
Philippines, Mexico, and others argue that many
agrofuels are to be produced from crops similar to
Jatropha that are not human foods and therefore, they
make the claim that in such cases, food for cars (agrofuels) does not in fact compete with food for people.
This is patently false, as the area to be planted to these
biomass crops often comes from areas that would
otherwise be devoted to food production. Furthermore,

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when biomass crops are planted on marginal soils,

they often compete even more with food production,
as the expansion of agroindustry on the most fertile
lands of most countries has driven peasant and family
farm food producers precisely into those marginal
areas now slated for agrofuel production. Finally,
second- or third-generation agrofuels using cellulosic
technologies to turn normally nonharvested crop residues into agrofuels, will also damage food production. This is because the nonedible portions of food
plants such as maize should be incorporated into the
soil after harvest in order to maintain soil fertility. If
instead, they are harvested and sent to ethanol factories, we are likely to see a steep decline in soil fertility
and a resulting drop in food crop yields (Science
Daily, 2008). Agrofuels are clearly not the right policy
direction for a world faced with a food crisis.

Food Sovereignty: The Only

Way Out of the Crisis
Faced with this global scenario, and all of its implications, there is really just one alternative proposal
that is up to the challenge. Under the Food Sovereignty
paradigm, social movements and a growing number
of progressive and semiprogressive governments propose that we re-regulate the food commodity markets
that were deregulated under neoliberalism. And regulate them better than before they were deregulated,
with genuine supply management, making it possible
to set prices that are fair to both farmers and consumers alike, as outlined in Table 1 (Rosset, 2006).
That necessarily means a return to protection of the
national food production of nations, both against the
dumping of artificially cheap food that undercuts
local farmers, and against the artificially expensive
food imports that we face today. It means rebuilding
the national grain reserves and parastatal marketing
boards, in new and improved versions that actively
include farmer organizations as owners and administrators of public reserves. That is a key step toward
taking our food system back from the TNCs that
hoard food stocks to drive prices up (Rosset, 2006).
Countries urgently need to stimulate the recovery
of their national food producing capacity, specifically
that capacity located in the peasant and family farm
sectors, and that means public-sector budgets, floor
prices, credit and other forms of support, and genuine
agrarian reform. Land reform is urgently needed in
many countries to rebuild the peasant and family
farm sectors, whose vocation is growing food for

Table 1
Food Sovereignty Policies
to Address the Global Food Price Crisis
u P
rotect domestic food markets against both dumping
(artificially low prices) and artificially high prices driven by
speculation and volatility in global markets
u A return to improved versions of supply management
policies at the national level and improved international
commodity agreements at a global level
u Recovery of the productive capacity of peasant and family
farm sectors, via floor prices, improved marketing boards,
public-sector budgets, and genuine agrarian reform
u Rebuild improved versions of public sector and or farmerowned basic food inventories, elimination of transnationals
and the domestic private sector as the principal owners of
national food stocks
u Controls against hoarding, speculating, and forced export of
needed foodstuffs
u An immediate moratorium on agrofuels
u The technological transformation of farming systems, based
on agroecology, to break the link between food and
petroleum prices, and to conserve and restore the productive
capacity of farm lands

people, because the largest farms and agribusinesses

seem to only produce for cars and for export (Rosset,
Patel, & Courville, 2006). And many countries need
to implement export controls, as a number of governments have done in recent months, to stop the forced
exportation of food desperately needed by their own
populations.
Finally, we must change dominant technological
practices in farming, toward an agriculture based on
agroecological principles, that is sustainable, and that
is based on respect for and is in equilibrium with
nature, local cultures, and traditional farming knowledge (Altieri, 2008). It has been scientifically demonstrated that ecological farming systems can be more
productive, can better resist drought and other manifestations of climate change, and are more economically sustainable because they use less fossil fuel. We
can no longer afford the luxury of food whose price is
linked to the price of petroleum (see Schill, 2008),
much less whose industrial monoculture production
modelwith pesticides and GMOs (genetically modified organisms)damages the future productive
capacity of our soils. Clearly, we need an immediate
moratorium on agrofuels.
All of these recommendations, which address each
of the major cause of the crisis, are part of the food
sovereignty proposal (La Via Campesina, 2008;
Rosset, 2006). The time seems to have truly arrived
for La Via Campesina and for Food Sovereignty.
There is no other real solution to feeding the world,

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Rosset / Agrofuels and Food Crisis 193

and it is up to each and every one of us to help force

the changes in national and international public policy
that are so urgently needed.

Notes
1. La Via Campesina (2008). Declaration of Maputo: V International Conference of La Via Campesina. Retrieved November
12, 2008, from http://www.viacampesina.org/main_en/index.php?
option =com_content&task=view&id=623&Itemid=1.
2. www.viacampesina.org.
3. Those assertions in this section that do not include bibliographic citations come from: Berthelot (2008); La Via Campesina
(2008); GRAIN (2008).

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Ray, D. E. (2008). Data show that Chinas more meat-based diet is
NOT the cause of ballooned international corn prices? Knoxville,
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408.pdf
Rosset, P. M. (2006). Food is Different: Why we must get the WTO
out of agriculture. London: Zed Books.
Rosset, P., Patel, R., & Courville, M. (Eds.). (2006). Promised
land: Competing visions of agrarian reform. Oakland, CA:
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Schill, S. R. (2008, June). Perfect storm for fertilizer prices.
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Peter Rosset is a researcher at the Center for the Study of

Rural Change in Mexico (CECCAM), is co-coordinator of
the Land Research Action Network (www.landaction.org),
and is a member of the technical support team of La Via
Campesina (www.viacampesina.org). He is the author of a
number of books, among them, Food Is Different: Why We
Must Get the WTO Out of Agriculture (2006) and Promised
Land: Competing Visions of Agrarian Reform (2006).

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