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The seminar "Climate Change in Today’s Global Agenda" was held on the second day of sessions of the IDB Annual Meeting. From then on, climate change and renewable energies largely monopolized the announcements made at the meeting in Miami. These are framed within the context of a strong rise in global food prices and the debate on its causes.

Latin America is highly vulnerable to the effects of global climate change and should immediately implement policies and practices that may help to mitigate it by supporting, for instance, the production of biofuels, said experts and IDB officials. However, one of the major obstacles is the lack of financial resources to access those “green” technologies. Therefore, developed nations and the IDB have a key role to play in order to allow countries in the region to afford such advances, they pointed out.

According to Moreno, “there are broad possibilities of increasing energy efficiency and reducing contamination in the region, while also encouraging economic development”.

Nevertheless, IDB biofuel policies were criticized by civil society groups, which believe that those policies have damaged rural communities, causing violent conflicts and aggravating global warming. Kate Horner, of Friends of the Earth-US, stated that the fact that the IDB is strongly encouraging biofuels, “can be good for corporations but bad for farmers, indigenous people and the environment in Latin America”.

Further controversy

For the UN Special Rapporteur, Jean Ziegler, the use of biofuels has turned into a “crime against humanity”, taking into account the global problem of increasing food prices.

In an interview with Bayerischer Runfunk radio station, Ziegler said that the burning of hundreds of millions of tons of corn, rice and other cereals to produce biofuels is a major factor in the hike in food prices.

Other factors mentioned by Ziegler are IMF policies that force many Third World countries to have an export-oriented agriculture at the expense of a subsistence economy- and market speculation that causes the hike in food prices. Ziegler warned about the fact that we are currently at the threshold of a dangerous situation in which food riots led by people who are fighting for their survival and fearing for their lives could end up being multiplied.

Ziegler’s remarks triggered answers from Brazil, which defended its biofuel policy. The Communications Secretariat of the Presidency pointed out that the surface devoted to food production in Brazil has not been reduced in spite of the fact that the volume of biofuels is growing at a steady pace.

A spokesman of the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the media that Rapporteur Ziegler probably did not intend to refer to Brazil, where ethanol is made out of sugar cane, but referred to the corn-derived ethanol produced in the United States, which is responsible for the rise in that cereal.

For its part, Brazil’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Celso Amorim asked “multilateral institutions, such as the IMF, to fight agricultural subsidies in Europe and the US, instead of attacking bioenergy and relate it to the current food crisis”. “If the IMF succeeds in making the richest countries eliminate subsidies from their inefficient agricultures, it will contribute much more than” when it criticizes the production of biofuels, Amorim said to the media.

These remarks also respond to the statements made by the IMF Managing Director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who pointed out that “the worst” of the global food crisis may be yet to come and biofuels derived from crops pose “a real moral problem”.

The controversy over the cause of soaring food prices and the role of biofuels also became the central issue at the FAO regional conference held in Brasilia. Technical experts from the institution requested more support for family agriculture in Latin America, as a way to ensure food security in times of food crisis. The body also warned about the fact that the growing production of biofuels at global level threatens to limit the access to food by the poorest sectors in Latin America.

Source: Reuters and El Nuevo Herald

Related Information:

* Climate Change in Today's Global Agenda, IDB Seminar

* IDB announces partnership to develop sustainable biofuels

* Declaration on agrofuels, by Friends of Earth

* An explosive global crisis: financial instability, food riots, global warming, by Trade Observatory (IATP)

* The debate on biofuels: Between food security and the price of oil, by Gerardo Honty (ALAI)

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