Financial Times:Biofuels should benefit poor

Financial Times:Biofuels should benefit poor

Published: August 14 2007 18:31 | Last updated: August 14 2007 18:31

Much of the current debate on bioenergy, focusing on negative aspects such as sharply increased food prices and erosion of biodiversity, ob­scures the sector’s huge potential to reduce hunger and poverty.

If we get it right, bioenergy provides us with a historic chance to fast-forward growth in many of the world’s poorest countries, to bring about an agricultural renaissance and to supply modern energy to a third of the world’s population.

However, that momentous promise can be fulfilled only if the right decisions are made now and the appropriate policies put in place. We urgently need to draw up an international bio­energy strategy. In the absence of such a plan we run the risk of producing diametrically opposite effects: deeper poverty and greater environmental damage.

Specifically, our strategy must ensure that a significant share of the multi-billion-dollar-a-year bioenergy market is produced by farmers and rural labourers in the developing world, the people who make up 70 per cent of the world’s poor.

It should include a set of policies promoting access by the rural poor to an international bioenergy market. First, it will require the lowering of trade barriers operated by some Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries against ethanol imports.

Second, we need to ensure that smallholder farmers can organise themselves to produce, process and market bioenergy feedstock on the scale required. In practice this means making credit and micro-credit avail­able to them, and helping them to form co-operatives.

Third, it will require a certification system to ensure that bioenergy products can be traded only if they meet requisite environmental standards. Such a system would encourage production by smallholders, who typically operate complex, bio-diverse production systems, as opposed to the mono-cropping practised on large, industrial-scale estates.

Such measures would allow developing countries – which generally have ecosystems and climates more suited to biomass production than industrialised nations, and often have ample reserves of land and labour – to use their comparative advantage.

But as things now stand, the Inter­national Energy Agency (IEA) projects that in 2030, biofuels will provide between 4 per cent and 7 per cent of all fuels used for transport, with the US, the European Union and Brazil remaining the leading producers and consumers. If that proves correct, it will mean that we had a chance to honour all our solemn pledges to banish hunger and poverty but chose to look the other way.

So far the debate on biofuels has focused almost exclusively on substituting for fossil oil in transport. But at present biofuels for transport account for less than 1 per cent of global energy production. A far greater part of the world’s energy, 10 per cent, is supplied by “traditional bioenergy” – firewood, charcoal, manure and crop residues – which warms homes and fuels cooking fires in much of the developing world.

To focus debate exclusively on bio­fuels for transport is therefore to miss much of the point about bioenergy’s potential for poverty reduction. This lies more in helping 2bn people to produce their own electricity and other energy needs than in keeping 800m cars and trucks on the road.

Electricity is what powers development: you cannot run computer networks on dried cow dung. But with modern technology you can process the dung into bio-gas. Helping 2bn people living on less than two dollars a day switch to affordable, homegrown, environmentally sustainable bio-power would represent a quantum leap in their development.

Promoting such a change is all the more urgent because the 300 per cent increase in oil prices registered over the past few years is imposing a crippling burden on the economies of the world’s poorest nations.

These issues need to be tackled urgently to avoid damage now. Our objective should be a high-level meeting by next summer at the latest to agree the ground rules for an inter­national bioenergy market. This is to ensure that bioenergy realises its potential to fuel sustainable growth and progress as well as to prevent it enriching the already rich, further impoverishing the chronically poor and inflicting greater damage on our increasingly fragile environment.

| 13.08.07 | 18h36 • Mis à jour le 13.08.07 | 18h38

La 17e édition de la Semaine mondiale de l'eau s'est ouverte, lundi 13 août, à Stockholm, avec un congrès rassemblant quelque 2 500 experts du monde entier. Ils vont se pencher sur le réchauffement climatique, les agrocarburants ou encore les installations sanitaires.

La manifestation a été ouverte par le premier ministre suédois, Fredrik Reinfeldt, qui a lancé un appel à la mobilisation et à la coopération des gouvernements, des individus et de tous les secteurs de la société face aux dangers du changement climatique. "Dans certaines parties du monde, le réchauffement de la planète va se traduire par des pénuries d'eau, la sécheresse et des déserts de plus en plus grands. Dans d'autres parties (du monde), il y aura de plus en plus de pluies, de tempêtes et d'inondations", a mis en garde le chef du gouvernement suédois.

UN MILLIARD D'INDIVIDUS N'ONT PAS ACCÈS À L'EAU POTABLE

Rappelant qu'actuellement plus d'un milliard d'individus n'ont pas accès à l'eau potable, il a souligné que chaque jour, environ 34 000 personnes meurent de maladies liées au manque d'eau et de systèmes sanitaires.

Intitulé "Progrès et perspectives dans le domaine de l'eau : pour un développement durable dans un monde qui change", le congrès s'articule autour de conférences et d'ateliers animés par des représentants de gouvernements et d'entreprises, des spécialistes du secteur de l'eau, des membres d'ONG et des responsables des Nations unies. Parmi les nombreux thèmes qui seront abordés figurent aussi la question des investissements par les banques et les entreprises dans le secteur de l'eau ou encore la coopération entre Etats voisins sur la gestion de l'eau. Cette manifestation, devenue au fil des années le grand rendez-vous mondial sur les questions de l'eau, s'achèvera samedi 18 août

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By Mark Kinver

Science and nature reporter, BBC News

The idea that the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant has created a wildlife haven is not scientifically justified, a study says.

Recent studies said rare species had thrived despite raised radiation levels as a result of no human activity.

But scientists who assessed the 1986 disaster's impact on birds said the ecological effects were "considerably greater than previously assumed".

The findings appear in the Royal Society's journal, Biology Letters.

In April 1986, reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded.

After the accident, traces of radioactive deposits were found in nearly every country in the northern hemisphere.

The paper's authors, Anders Moller of University Pierre and Marie Curie, France, and Tim Mousseau from the University of South Carolina, US, said their research did not support the idea that low-level radiation was not affecting animals.

"Recent conclusions from the UN Chernobyl Forum and reports in the popular media concerning the effects of radiation from Chernobyl has left the impression that the exclusion zone is a thriving ecosystem, filled with an increasing number of rare species," they wrote.

Instead, they added: "Species richness, abundance and population density of breeding birds decreased with increasing levels of radiation."

The study, which recorded 1,570 birds from 57 species, found that the number of birds in the most contaminated areas declined by 66% compared with sites that had normal background radiation levels.

It also reported a decline of more than 50% in the range of species as radiation levels increase.

The findings build on a previous study of barn swallows in the affected area, which showed that the number of the birds declined sharply in contaminated areas.

The birds' decline was probably the result of depressed level of antioxidants after its long migration back to the area, making it more vulnerable to the low-level radiation, the researchers concluded.

"It suggests to us that barn swallows are not alone; there are many other species that appear to be affected in a similar way," Professor Mousseau told BBC News.

"This paper also suggests that birds feeding on insects that are living in the upper surface of the soil, where contaminates are highest, seem to be most likely to be missing or depressed."

He added that they were currently carrying out research to find out whether the decline was a result of the birds eating contaminated insects, or whether it was a result of fewer insects living in affected areas.

"We are also looking for funding to expand the range of ecological studies to include invertebrates, as well as plants and animals."

Radioactive retreat

A recent paper published in the American Scientist magazine suggested that plants and animals were better off in the exclusion zone than specimens outside the 30km radius surrounding the site of the destroyed nuclear reactor.

One of the paper's co-authors, Robert Baker from the Texas Tech University, said that the benefits for wildlife from the lack of human activity outweighed the risks of low-level radiation.

Writing on his university web page, Professor Baker said: "The elimination of human activities such as farming, ranching, hunting and logging are the greatest benefits.

"It can be said that the world's worst nuclear power plant disaster is not as destructive to wildlife populations as are normal human activities."

Professor Mousseau acknowledged Professor Baker's description: "It is true that the Chernobyl region gives the appearance of a thriving ecosystem because of its protection from other human activities.

"However, when you do controlled ecological studies, what we see is a very clear signature of negative effects of contamination on diversity and abundance of organisms.

"We clearly need to be applying scientific method to ecological studies before we can conclude, based on anecdotal observations, that there are no consequences."

Story from BBC NEWS:

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