Land use: how can we do bioenergy right?
Some reflections after the IPCC report on Climate Change, Desertification, LandDegradation, Sustainable Land Management, Food Security, and Greenhouse gas fluxes in Terrestrial Ecosystems
The crux of the latest IPCC report, if you happened to have missed it, is that a different way of using the land can help us reduce greenhouse gas emissions in (mostly) agriculture (a source of methane, a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide), and greenhouse gas accumulation by storing it in plant and soil. The numbers are huge: a whopping quarter of all GHG emissions come out of use of natural land.
Peatland restoration project in Kalimantan, Indonesia. Photo by CIFOR.
However, it will not be easy to reduce them:
Conserving, restoring, and better managing land, as well as shifting diets to plant-based foods, requires coordination and careful planning, bridging fraught political and social fault lines.
“It really calls on us to think across the entire food production chain,” said Debra Roberts, co-chair of the IPCC’s Working Group II, during a press conference announcing the report’s findings. “There’s no single silver bullet. It means we’re going to have to tackle complex issues and complex needs.” (Cited in this Vox piece)
In saying “there is no silver bullet”, she does not only mean we need to add up lots of ‘little’ solutions. It also means that one solution may compete with another, or that it might work in context A but not B. It’s a big puzzle. However, the report is a good initial map of what works well or when measures will prove counterproductive.
Making land great again
For this newsletter, I would like to zoom in on one type of possible friction though. In emerging economies, socio-economic development and even food security need to be balanced with land-uses that contribute to a more liveable climate overall. If not handled with care, these interests will clash (and have clashed), certainly in the short to middle term.
The potential friction is in large part the result of the challenge of coordination that Roberts mentioned. How do you organize these changes across that whole food (or bioenergy) production chain? How can you make sure that everyone’s interests are met, across these vast distances and with very clear power differences? The IPCC makes recommendations for how to meet this challenge. New governance models need to (among many other things):
Address the complexity by going all “multilevel, hybrid and cross-sectoral”, to bring all these different places into a closer, evolving relation with each other
Involve local stakeholders in particular, especially those most vulnerable (not because it’s good, this is science, but because it’s effective)
Not pretend that trade-offs between climate and (the local) economy don’t exist, so you can redress or compensate for it as much as possible
Infographic in the category ‘easier said than done’.
You can see how these points are directly relevant to Green New Deal-inspired policymaking, which would emphasize the importance of helping other countries achieve their own Green New Deal. As mentioned earlier, every country needs to be on board for this to work, but more crucially, it will only work if every country takes pains to make this transition as equitable as possible.
Let’s dip into the literature for some context.
Big Biofuel
Most journalistic accounts of the IPCC report focus on food, but the report also talks about biofuels and conservation for biodiversity and carbon capture. Biofuels are most directly relevant for this newsletter, so it’s the one I’ll talk about. The three are inseparable from each other though, because the central problem to all of this is: how are we going to allocate our land?
Jatropha is one of the main biofuel crops. And it’s good for soap too. Photo taken in Zambia, again courtesy of the good folks at CIFOR.
The EU is one of the biggest markets for biofuels. (Biofuel is problematic for a number of reasons, though not hopeless.) Its biofuel policy goes back to the 1970s and the first oil crisis, but since the early 2000s it has mostly been considered from the vantage point of sustainability. The EU relies heavily on import to meet its targets, so it has devised a whole set of criteria that producers need to comply with in order to enter the European market. (cf. Harnesk & Brogaard 2017: 164f. )Sustainability is an important part of those criteria, but Blaber-Wegg et al (2015) note that the EU has made no real provisions for social equity. Hence, let’s see what’s up with that.
Now, all this time you’ve probably been thinking, ‘when is this guy going to mention land grabbing, huh? We’re half-way through the newsletter and that’s like the single most important issue in terms of equitable land use!’
If that is so, my apologies for keeping you waiting. I will rectify the situation presently.
Land grabs (there!)
“Land grabbing”, or in this case “green grabbing” (Hunsberger et al 2016: 306), is said to occur when land is expropriated from customary users or otherwise marginal owners by and for elites, sometimes in the services of international companies. When land is properly grabbed – that is, without any real consultation of remuneration – it can be because of an absent state, by an repressive state or under a state in transition (where resources are often up for….er, grabs by political entrepreneurs navigating shifting alliances).
Thus, Aha and Ayitey 2017 recount how in Ghana customary chiefs sold off large tracts of lands for biofuels without consulting the users. While farmers were often not cut off from all their land, their diminished sense of tenure security meant they invested less in their remaining agricultural activity, leading potentially to food security issues.
Moreda 2017, meanwhile, show us an Ethiopian state actively involved in taking away land from ethnic minorities who used the land for shifting cultivation and pastoralism. The appropriation of land for, among other purposes, biofuels can be seen as the attempt to gain more control over a hitherto peripheral region.
Hunsberger et al (2016) focus on two cases of land conflicts in countries in “political transitions”: Myanmar, which is opening up to international agribusiness precisely in those places where civil conflict was fiercest (and where international conservation agencies want to set up shop!), while in Cambodia, the government is restricting customary access to land in the name of sustainable lumber extraction.
Complex politics
If your idea of land grabbing was that big multinationals come stomping in with offers that state can’t refuse, these very brief insights into land grabbing should alert you to the fact that land grabbing is more of a complex co-construction. Thus, in Tanzania, the prospect of various European companies growing biofuel for the EU market spurred developmentalist ambitions of the Tanzanian government. Its own agenda was to ‘modernize’ the country’s agriculture. But shaping the policies occurred in settings devised by European funding agencies and their experts, whose main interest was securing (raw) biomass for the EU. It didn’t annul the state’s agency, but it was harder to set the terms of the debate. Moreover, it lent amplification to these external expert voices over those of domestic academics and activists, who perceived other risks and opportunities. (Harnesk & Brogaard 2017)
Castellanos-Navarette & Jansen’s (2017) attempt to understand why peasant from Chiapas in Mexico were in favour of (rather risky) introduction of biofuel crops shows as an even more complicated picture of power relations. They show that their support comes in large part through the active promotion of the new plans by local leaders, hoping to gain political support by creating new work. These local leaders, as heads of indigenous workers’ organizations, were able to impose concessions from the state government who initially opposed the plans. Individual members were aware they were only able to get these concessions through the force of these numbers. But they weren’t mere peons in a political game either. They were aware of their local leaders’ ambitions and the way they stood to profit from the deals. But, according to the authors, it was a rational deal as long as they got something out of it. When crops subsequently failed, they also dropped support for the leader.
Chiapas governor Juan Sabines holds out jatropha “biodiesel”, back in 2009, when it still held its promise. Photo via his Flickr account.
Policy recommendations
So what does all this mean for how to make sure biofuel crops are grown in equitable ways, at their most ‘effective’? Hunsberger et al offer several suggestions:
As we’ve seen, social and political relations can be messy: it’s that messiness that will derail any attempt to roll out any general purpose policy framework. Instead you go with the flow by having researcher boots on the grounds (how do you like them mixed metaphors?).
Researchers need to work together with “activists and local communities” to build up a dossier that can be mobilized in negotiations. That takes time.
To force powerful actors’ hands, climate policy frameworks aren’t enough and any normative framework (“peace, democracy and social justice”, p 317) should be moulded to be the proverbial flower in the proverbial guns.
If actual guns are involved, proverbial flowers are obviously not going to accomplish anything. You need some balance of power to start with. Thus, the Ghanaian case presents openings (and in fact, the state already started regulating large-scale customary land purchases). Coming back to the EU, if it wants to do business with the Tanzanias and Mexicos of this world, they can set-up negotiation tables in ways that redraw the balance slightly more evenly between all stakeholders – it can start by prescribing equity rules in its certification criteria.
Folks, hope this was enlightening! You can now follow this newsletter on Twitter (@GreenNewSci)! If you’re there too, hit me up, and don’t feel shy to extol the virtues of this publication with a mention or two. Bye!
Sources
Aha, Bismark, and Jonathan Z. Ayitey. 2017. "Biofuels and the hazards of land grabbing: Tenure (in)security and indigenous farmers’ investment decisions in Ghana". Land Use Policy. 60: 48-59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biortech.2009.01.059
Blaber-Wegg, Tina, Jennifer Hodbod, and Julia Tomei. 2015. "Incorporating equity into sustainability assessments of biofuels". Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. 14: 180-186. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2015.05.006
Castellanos-Navarrete, Antonio, and Kees Jansen. 2017. "Why do smallholders plant biofuel crops? The ‘politics of consent’ in Mexico". Geoforum. 87: 15-27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.09.019
Harnesk, David and Sara Brogaard. 2017. "Social Dynamics of Renewable Energy—How the European Union’s Renewable Energy Directive Triggers Land Pressure in Tanzania". The Journal of Environment & Development. 26 (2): 156-185. https://doi.org/10.1177/1070496516681043
Hunsberger C., Kham S.S., Park C., Sokheng S., Thein S., et al. 2016. "Climate change mitigation, land grabbing and conflict: towards a landscape-based and collaborative action research agenda". Canadian Journal of Development Studies. 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/02255189.2016.1250617
Moreda, Tsegaye. 2017. "Large-scale land acquisitions, state authority and indigenous local communities: insights from Ethiopia". Third World Quarterly. 38 (3): 698-716. https://doi.org /10.1080/01436597.2016.1191941
If you do not have the appropriate credentials to cross the paywall to these articles, maybe you can check out https://sci-hub.tw (just copy past in the doi number), or if you are uncomfortable with that, send me a message and I’ll lend you a copy.