U.S. Biofuels Targets Fueling Hunger and May Lead to Increased Violence in Poor Countries
Jenna Farineau
Mario Cucul Cu, 29 and his wife Candelaria Choc Pau, 26 with their children (3 boys, 10, 5, 2 years) in the house they rent in the K'Quinich community.
Quotes from Mario Cucul, 29:
Before the eviction we grew maize, beans, chillies, rice, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, cassava, bananas, plantain. We harvested all of this which enabled us to support ourselves. We sold maize and beans which allowed us to support our children.
Before the eviction, we were selling our maize with enough left over to feed our children also. We sold maize (corn) to buy our clothes, my trousers and shirts, clothes for the children, all the clothes for my wife. With maize we could buy things. But now that we arenât selling anything, we are poor.
Before the eviction we were eating three times a day but now we are not eating three times a day but only early in the morning when we eat small tortillas and at lunchtime only water and a bun, and we are only seeking food for the children because the children cannot tolerate being hungry. My wife and I can tolerate the hunger but the children cannot tolerate it. They start to cry or they get ill.
Before the children were healthy. Now the children are ill because there isnât enough food for them.
Where we were before was where our great-great-grandparents and their grandparents were born. They were born there, they grew up there, they planted crops there on the land of our great grandparents and our grandparents. I donât know how they could do it.
This is our home, we were born here, we want to live here, where they evicted us from.
Seeing all of this that the company is growing is painful for us because we are suffering because we sowed and harvested there. We cry every day that we donât find food.
Now I only have land for the house. I donât have any land for growing crops now. Now we are only buying in the market.
Quotes from Candalaria Choc Pau, 26:
Before my children were healthy. Now they are sick. Because now they donât have food, sometimes they eat, sometimes they donât. And they are getting sick.
There are times that⦠if we have tortilla, we will eat one or two tortilla, just with salt, because there isnât anywhere, there isnâtâ¦we donât have any money to buy our food.
My children are just breastfeeding from my breasts, we donât have any money to buy any other things, we donât have money. I am fed up, I canât deal with being like this anymore, without anything. We are fed up of being hungry. I am very sick, because I donât have any food anymore, I donât have any food, I donât have any to give my children, because of this I am poor, you can see without shoes.
Iâm very sad becauseâ¦these poor little childrenâ¦look at their t-shirts and they all go barefoot and they are all undernourished because we donât have money to buy their food or to get them vitamins. They are all ill and all frightened because they now know what eviction means.
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Short Summary
In the Polochic Valley, in the North of Guatemala, several indigenous communities were violently evicted from land that has been in their families for generations to make way for plantations to grow sugar that could be turned into biofuels to fuel cars in Europe. After losing the lands they had worked and lived on for generations, many live in precarious conditions and struggle to feed their families.
The communities evicted included the Inup Agua Caliente community and the K'Quinich community.
Longer summary
The European Union (EU)'s demand for biofuels is driving the expansion of crops that can be turned into biofuels in areas already experiencing severe lack of food, such as the Polochic Valley in Guatemala, where 65% to 85% of the children under 5 are suffering from chronic malnutrition.
Between 2003 and 2008, Chabil Utzaj SA refinery, took over most of the land in the Polochic Valley to grow sugar that could be used to fuel cars in Europe. This left the indigenous communities who had lived and worked on the land for generations without land to grow food to support their families.
When Chabil Utzaj declared bankruptcy in 2009, some of the communities, seeing the land lying idle, returned to farm the lands and grow crops to feed their families. Chabil Utzaj then obtained a court order to evict the communities who had come back to the land. Eleven of the fourteen communities, including the Inup Agua Caliente community and the K'Quinich community, were violently evicted from the land in March 2011, affecting approximately 800 Qâeqchiâ families. Serious human rights violations were recorded during the evictions and a number of fatalities were associated with the conflict.
The communities are now living in the surrounding areas, renting small plots to live on. They work on a day-to-day basis when work is available, but many have serious difficulties providing food for their families.
The communities are campaigning to claim their rights. In response to their campaign, in June 2011 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights called on the state of Guatemala to take action to protect the lives of those in the community
“Hunger anywhere threatens peace everywhere,” said Professor Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan in his 1994 report of the International Commission on Peace and Food to the United Nations.
In recent years we’ve put further pressure on our food supply by increasing the amount of food that we use for fuel. Since 2007, for example, the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) has required transportation fuel to contain a minimum volume of renewable fuels. These biofuels are overwhelmingly made from food-crops on farmland.
This mandate was intended to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change. But unfortunately, producing these biofuels creates more emissions than initially expected. Not only have these mandates failed to deliver the environmental benefits, they have also created adverse impacts all over the world.
Today, much of the corn, sugarcane and soy, which once went to food or animal feed, is being used as fuel. Because of the RFS, ethanol consumption in the U.S. has increased. This, among other factors, pushed up the prices of corn and other agricultural products, hitting the world’s poorest people hardest. Between 2006 and 2011, poor countries spent an additional $6.6 billion in increased food costs. Since 2005, the production of ethanol has cost Mexican consumers $250 to $500 million per year in higher corn prices. For Guatemalans, the additional cost of importing corn during the trade year 2010-2011 was $28 million.
Our thirst for of biofuels has contributed to the expansion of industrial monocrops in Latin America, Africa and Asia, where local, local farmers are denied access land to feed themselves and their communities. Unable to grow their own food, local people are forced to buy what they need in the local markets. But increased demand and reduced supply often results in much higher food prices, which the world’s poorest people simply can’t afford. Losing land also means farmers lose their income. Faced with decreased incomes and higher food prices, local farmers and their families are increasingly going hungry.
But the impacts of this increase in the number of hungry people in the world don’t just stop there. War and famine, two of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, ride side by side. Hunger and violent political conflicts in many developing countries are often linked. As more countries adopt similar biofuel mandates, more food will be turned into fuel around the world. If this continues, and the food prices spike again, it’s possible that we will see more violent conflicts in countries that are food insecure.
Hunger and violent political conflicts in many developing countries are often associated. This study is one of many that link a surge in food prices to political unrest, showing that the 2010 and 2011 food shortages was one of many triggers of the Arab Spring.
As competition for food increases, the greatest impacts are felt by women. Although women grow the majority of the world’s food, they also make up the majority of those affected by global hunger. Women and girls are particularly at risk as they are often fed last and the least. Food insecurity also exposes women to violence, sexual exploitation and disease.
A study of 2000 women in Botswana and Swaziland, two South African countries, showed that women who did not have enough to eat were twice as likely to become sex workers and be sexually exploited. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) and the UN World Food Program also reported in 2005 that when food rations were cut at refugee camps in Tanzania, violence against women increased. Not only were women at risk being arrested, beaten and raped when they ventured outside the camp to look for food or work, but, ration reductions also increased domestic violence against them.
Around 795 million people go to bed hungry every single night. There are many things we can and should do to decrease hunger and promote social justice, especially as we are confronting climate change. Reforming the RFS should be an easy one. If so many people around the world already go to bed hungry, why are we putting even more fuel made from food into our gas tanks? Corn ethanol and food-based biofuels are a false solution to climate change that do real harm for people and the environment.
We must take action and tell Congress and President Obama to reduce the impacts of biofuels on hunger and violence by reforming the RFS.
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