Socio-environmental impacts of biofuel production: practice (German et al., 2011)

As mentioned before, in science nothing is considered correct or incorrect until proven to be wrong, so I felt it may be useful to compare the findings of CIFOR (2010) with another recent scientific study. Similarly to CIFOR, German et al. (2011) found the impacts of biofuels on employment rates and the market involvement of smallholders to be generally positive. This has been found to have led to positive economic outcomes in the areas where biofuels were involved, through increasing incomes and through the provision of better social and physical infrastructure from industrial investment. However, problems were found to be associated with the changing away from traditional rural lifestyles, traditional land rights and with certain environmental impacts, which is also highly similar to what CIFOR (2010) found. The two studies have also both found great spatial variations in the socio-environmental effects of biofuels, meaning that drawing conclusions on whether biofuels are a ‘way ahead’ or a ‘blind alley’ in practice would be far too simplistic, ignoring these differences. This leads me to reiterate that this means that the impacts of biofuels are determined by the quality of management, as they depend on whether biofuels are allowed to take place in cases where they are harmful. I will now illustrate the significance of this match between the potential effects of biofuels under the different circumstances and the management chosen with some examples from the study by German et al..

For example, as mentioned in the CIFOR study there is a potential for biofuel cultivation on degraded and abandoned (and hence ‘unproductive’) land, which is said to be generally sustainable and beneficial environmentally and socially under certain circumstances. However, problems arise when areas are defined as ‘abandoned’ when they are in reality being used by some people, such as the landless poor, which was found to have happened in a number of locations. Problems also arise when natural ecosystems are converted, which was found to have happened in 59% of the cases of oil palm expansion in Malaysia and in 56% of such expansion in Indonesia in 1990-2005. This expansion was carried out by large industrial groups, leading to making a very similar conclusion to CIFOR (2010) that large industrial expansion and poor management of this generally leads to a lack of sustainability an therefore should not be allowed by the managers. However, if it does take place, good management plays an especially important role, where the views of all stakeholders must be incorporated, otherwise it leads to problems such as the aforementioned loss of access to the vital land and resources for the landless and disputes over land rights. This has been illustrated by the 3500 cases of disputes found in Indonesia associated with the palm oil industry.

However, this leads me to making another point, which is that perhaps biofuels are not the cause of the problems such as deforestation and inequality in access to resources, to power and to land, but merely an excuse for the poor management leading to these effects. I concluded this after observing the numerous other factors, such as land privatization (Gibson et al., 2002) and the global food industry (McAlpine et al., 2009 - see Daniel Hdidouan's blog for more about this!), blamed for these same problems of increasing social inequality and enviornmental harm. I feel that under sound management these problems could be often avoided even under the current global biofuels expansion, land privatization and the incorporation of the food industry. 

In conclusion, I believe that a comprehensive evaluation of the socio-environmental impacts of biofuels through space and time is practically impossible due to the complexity of the issue, as the impacts are so dependent on the multiple management factors. This means that under sound management, where the socio-environmental effects of the different management strategies have been evaluated and the optimal one that incorporates the views of all stakeholders was chosen, biofuels are expected to generally have positive effects. However, under poor management, which does not incorporate the views of all stakeholders equally and does not act in a way which will be optimal for the people and the environment, biofuels will likely have a higher negative impact. Nonetheless, from the two studies on the global impacts of biofuels so far which i have rewied in my blog, i seems that the general socio-environmental impacts of biofuels seem to be positive, with the individual cases of significant negative impacts appearing less wide-spread and more case-specific than the positive.