Lindsay Patterson

Until recently, I hadn’t heard much about food security. It’s an update to phrases like “solving world hunger,” which seems somewhat impossible. Food security sounds more accessible. It can be defined as existing “when all people, at all times, have access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.”

Food security is an optimist. World hunger is a pessimist.

Miguel Altieri is neither an optimist nor a pessimist. He’s an agroecologist at the University of California at Berkeley. He says food security can be achieved if people have the land and resources to be self-sufficient in agriculture, but he prefers the term food sovereignty. Food sovereignty is the ability of people to determine their own food systems, rather than have to rely on the changing and uncertain nature of the international food market.

I spoke with Altieri last week about how ethanol use in the U.S. might affect food security (or food sovereignty, or hunger, whichever you prefer) in Latin America and South America. Here’s the radio show based on our conversation. And here’s what else Altieri had to say.

What’s the drive behind biofuels?

Miguel Altieri: The big drive for biofuels in Latin America, which is basically biodiesel and ethanol, is related to the demand for biofuels from United States. The market signals from the United States and the deals that are being made with different governments promote growth of crops, especially soybeans and oil palm in the case of biodiesel, and sugarcane and ethanol in the case of ethanol.

How long has this been going on?

Brazil and Argentina have been producing their own ethanol for a long time. In Brazil you have the option to use a 20% mix of gas and ethanol at the pump or pure ethanol as part of their strategy to become energy independent. But the big push to grow crops for the US is something recent, in the past two years. President Bush recently went down to Brazil to come up with a deal so that Brazil would be producing sugarcane massively for feeding the cars in the United States.

But isn’t there an embargo on importing sugarcane from Brazil?

The United States had been trying to protect their farmers from the production of biofuels in Brazil and Argentina, so there has been a moratorium. But that will have to be lifted, because there’s no way that the United States will be able to produce all the biofuels they need to replace the oil.

The agricultural land area of the United States is 625,00 square acres. At present rates, meeting the demand for ethanol requires 1.4 million square acres. That’s double amount of acreage the US has for agriculture. In the case of soybeans it requires eight times the total land available in the US. So there’s no way that the United States can produce all the corn and soybean that is needed. So they’re going to try to get it from other countries.

So how is this going to affect Latin America?

It’s already happening. In Latin America, a tremendous amount of land that’s devoted to agriculture for feeding people will be devoted to agriculture for feeding cars in the north.

The first problem is that food sovereignty is going to be affected. The market signals are saying grow biofuels massively, and at the expense of agricultural production for food security. There’s going to be a condemnation of millions of people to hunger, or the country will have to import food from other countries.

The second problem is that biofuels are going to raise the cost of food. In Mexico everybody knows about the tortilla prices going up, and in Argentina and Brazil the meat prices are going up. All the land, and all the corn that is being produced is for ethanol rather than for cattle, or for tortillas, so they have to import now these products to make what they used to have as a staple food very cheaply.

The third impact is the fact that the expansion of this acreage is going to lead to huge deforestation. Already, soybean cultivation has resulted in the destruction of 21 million hectares of forest in brazil and about 14 million hectares in Argentina. It’s suspected that under global market pressure Brazil alone will likely clear an additional 60 million hectares of land in the near future to accommodate the production of biofuels (which should have received the better name of agro-fuels). So the impact deforestation is going to have on global climate, on biodiversity, on the water cycle, etcetera, is going to be huge.

And the fourth impact is the scale at which this is done. This is done with large monocultures which are systems which are ecologically vulnerable, and also use a lot of machinery, pesticides, and fertilizers. All that technology is going to compound the effects that industrial agriculture is already having on the countries.

What’s the alternative to this?

The alternative is that this country needs to give up its lifestyle based on cars and develop alternative transportation systems like in Europe, for example, where you have trains and bus systems so that people can mobilize independently.

I think people need to understand that biofuels is a word that is misleading. A lot of people think if they go that route they’re helping the planet climate change scenario but in fact they’re not, because the production of biofuels requires energy. You need about 1.3 gallons of petroleum to produce 1 gallon of ethanol, for example. And at the same time, all the technology that is used plus transportation produces gases that compound the problem of climate change.

So we need alternative energy and alternative transportation systems. The people in this country should realize that they’re 8% of world population but using 40% of the resources. That ecological appetite needs to end, because if we don’t do something, nature is going to take its course.

What kind of scenario would you like to see?

I would like to see the countries devote some of their land for agricultural production distinct to biofuels, but that that biofuel production be for energy sovereignty, that is, for the country. Or small farmers, for example, can grow biofuels for their own self sufficiency, so all the machinery can be fueled by biofuels. But at the same time, protect the land for what it is, which is producing food, not fuel.