New Biofuel Project in Isabela
Boon or Bane for Local People?
Jennifer Franco
Danny Carranza and Joann Fernandez (Rightsnet)
Tambuli

In recent years the idea of “sustainable biofuels” has taken hold in corporate boardrooms and state policymaking circles across the globe as the “solution” to the triple problem of energy (in)security, climate change, and rural poverty. As this idea takes hold, so does the idea that there is plenty of land available – especially in the global South — for producing biofuels sustainably, and in ways that will also improve rural poor people’s lives.

The result is a global biofuel boom that is driving forward a complex process of land use change and land property relations change on a large scale in many countries; many observers now refer to this process as the “global land grab”.

Although not as visibly or as dramatically as in Latin America, Africa and elsewhere in Asia, the global biofuel boom has touched the Philippines, likewise prompting a new rush for land there that threatens to undermine local food production systems, livelihoods, stressed ecosystems, and existing national land laws — all while reinforcing very undemocratic local political relationships.

One case in point involves a new biofuel project called Ecofuel, which has been slowly taking shape in the Northern Luzon province of Isabela since 2007. The project is backed by the P-Noy administration through its “Convergence” strategy framework for rural development (e.g., increasing cooperation and collaboration by Department of Agriculture, Department of Agrarian Reform, and Department of Environment and Natural Resources, towards an eventual merger into a single Department of Rural Development). The President’s three Convergence “czars” – DA Sec. Proceso Alcala, DAR Sec. Virgilio De los Reyes, and DENR Sec. Ramon Paje – were all present at the project’s launch last February in San Mariano.

Read full article @ www.tni.org

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