The Globalization and Development Reader: Perspectives on Development and Global Change, 2nd Edition

22 Agrofuels in the Food Regime (2010)

Philip McMichael

Introduction

The recent explosion of biofuels (a questionable response to the energy/climate crisis) is a blunt reminder of the extent to which capitalism externalises its costs. Cost externalisation is one clear consequence of commodity fetishism: wherein the social and ecological impacts of commodity relations are obscured by the price-form. Assigning a price to biophysical processes (as ‘natural resources’) objectifies them and conceals their socio-ecological relations. As indebted Southern governments compete for biofuel investment finance and Northern governments champion this ‘green fuel’, the social and ecological consequences of converting crop land and forest into a new profit frontier are hidden behind a façade of market environmentalism. What elsewhere I have called the ‘agrofuels project’ (McMichael 2008) is at the same time approximating a food-for-fuel regime. Through the lens of food regime analysis, the rush to agrofuels¹ can be seen to be the ultimate demystification of capitalism’s subjection of food to the commodity form: deepening the abstraction of food through its conversion to fuel, at the continuing expense of the environment.

Recognition of the contribution of agrofuels to the 2008 food crisis,² and the claim that a ton of palm oil produces 33 tons of CO² – ten times more per ton than petroleum (Rainforest Action Network 2007), emphasises the socio-ecological impact of agrofuels. Not only ...