Biofuels from the third world -Cars eat people! - Empty bellies and soil depletion on a world scale.

  
Thomas Moore once pointed out that people were being thrown off the land by the wool producing industry -that "sheep eat  people" in England. Land  and people clearance for  wool production. Then,at a later time in history sheep also ate many Aboriginal, first nation peoples ,in Australia on a continental scale.

Now it seems some imperialist country people think the car should eat the people in the third world. They want the human right to stuff their petrol tanks with cheap fuel even if it comes out of world food stocks and destroys natural productivity worldwide.

One poster on Sydney Indymedia , blind to such things as hunger soil depletion and imperialism , in a post and in comments made claims in effect ,Biofuels  are  all for the best in this best of possible worlds to let the market decide what is best for the environment -and the devil takes the hindmost -implying profits whatever is cheapest decides best.

It seems everything in the natural world can be subordinated  to meet the short term worlds need for cheap fuel" as it is  propagandised below as 'environmentally friendly" . This is the post.

"Biofuels from the 3rd World
Posted June 27th, 2008 by Anonymous
Conifer Plantations, Palm Oil Plantations & Sugar Cane are the order for the day from the Third World, of cause the processing of these crops into Biofuels could do with a little western skills. Western countries can also do there bit by producing Biofuels. Vast plantations need to be planted to meet the worlds need for cheap fuel. 

Conifers make Methanol, West African Oil palms make Bio Diesel & SugarCane produces Ethanol - All Cheap & environmentally friendly Biofuels for the World . . . "

http://sydney.indymedia.org.au/story/biofuels-3rd-world

This is a very nice reassuring thing to tell to the imperialist  labour aristocracy sheep in their cars and SUVs:
That Biofuels are a good solution for cheap fuel and even help to fight
 the global warming /climate changes that the wasteful consumerist lifestyles of capitalism and its profits for greed production system are creating.

But, what a mess for the majority of the world peoples, the poor.
In the third world food prices are going through the roof, the lands natural productivity is depleted everywhere their nutrients exported and vast forests being destroyed by capitalist anarchy and greed  . globaol warming   threatens the existence of all humanity

This is a desperate real world problem, hundreds of millions face malnutrition or even death The fact is that ,bio diesel production for maximum profit, is at the heart of the current problems, and under the profit system cannot be organised as environmentally friendly after the fact of destruction.

Third world People have the right to starve, or fight back for national independence against predatory imperialism
 
Its true that a lot could be done with permaculture , and as a recent thoughtful post  on syd Indymedia  says. Things like hemp can be a useful source of bio fuel. But promoted by imperialism for imperialist quick profits it might also be very destructive to food production and land use in the third world as is occurring in the rest of the biofuel industry.

 An Ancient Alternative to Oil
http://sydney.indymedia.org.au/story/ancient-alternative-oil

But this fibre and oil producing crop hemp  now has to be able to compete in the market place  with more profitable capitalist cotton crops. Private profits decide these things not good intentions or wishful thinking and short term profit grabbing takes little conern about  soil the soil itself .

A marxist view.

 Ecology is often seen as a recent invention.  But the idea that 
  capitalism degrades the environment in a way that disproportionately 
affects the poor and the colonized was already expressed in the 
nineteenth century in the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.  
Writing in Capital in 1867 on England's ecological imperialism 
toward Ireland, Marx stated: "For a century and a half England has 
indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its
cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the 
exhausted soil."  Marx was drawing here on the work of the German
chemist Justus von Liebig.  In the introduction to the seventh 
  (1862) edition of his Organic Chemistry in Its Applications to 
Agriculture and Physiology Liebig had argued that "Great Britain 
robs all countries of the conditions of their fertility" and singled 
out Britain's systematic robbing of Ireland's soil as a prime 
  example.  For Liebig a system of production that took more from 
nature than it put back could be referred to as a "robbery system," 
  a term that he used to describe industrialized capitalist
agriculture.1

 Following Liebig and other analysts of the nineteenth-century soil 
crisis, Marx argued that soil nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, and
potassium) were sent in the form of food and fiber sometimes
hundreds and thousands of miles to the cities, where, instead of 
being recycled back to the land, these nutrients ended up polluting 
the urban centers, with disastrous results for human health. 

   Creative people allied with the worlds people could in fact do a lot if production by labour and consumption  was all democratically organised in  a environmentally responsible  economic system created   for  solving peoples long term needs, not short term profit greed.But even large scale permaculture requires a change in the land ownership system 

But,there is plenty of available, underemployed labour ,in the third world for improving the human environment . (Billions of people )

This is one of the biggest criminal results of the private property based system of imperialism. Billions of people are underemployed and cannot utilise their productive hands in labour or apply  modern science to agriculture like permaculture in order  to consume what they could easily produce  .

Those still left surviving on the land have to compete economically with the huge mass production of big land capitalist farming and even with genetically modified crop and seed monopolies. Capitalism declares "Overpopulation" Simply  because it has no profitable use for their labour but only a use for their mouths as consumers and even then if they can find the cash.

But, the people do not possess  the world, its all private property and run for private profit. This private ownership of 'gods" earth , monopolising its  natural productivity mainly happened long before we were born into this world with the rise of class society.

Ownership by ruling classes -especially of land- determines distribution of the product and these property relations of class are backed up by their dictatorial states.
Western imperialism using colonialism and then imperialist neo-colonialism has its capitalist  tentacles gripping the land and natural resources in the third world too.
Production and the transfer of surplus value exploited from living labour are now no longer locally ,but looting of whole peoples organised on a world scale. 

This distribution of the product stemming fom land ownership can be seen with the relations between peoples in Australia. Settlers  claiming ownership  of the land they stole ,   brings with it the ownership and  all the benefit of the natural productivity and natural resources like minerals to  the white settler nation.

The aboriginals were swept aside by murder  to organise capitalist farming production and the exploitation of nature and natural resources. 
In earlier times first for wool for English factories and later for beef and wheat.
All this was profitable for the white settler 'pioneers" and murdering squatters because they did not even have to pay for the land.

Colonialism and colonialist cheap labour super-profits turned The First Nation Peoples into a third world people now  striving for a national unity.

Capitalist commodity farming everywhere makes its "progress" by throwing native or peasant  people off the land thereby  creating a  refugee "free " workers class  in cities. Capitalist free labourers , dependant  now  not on the land ,but on labour for capitalists simply in order to survive.
 
This is the historic practice of capitalism the creation of a scourge of huge urban slum cities  where the majority of the underemployed third world people, a reserve army of cheap labour now eke out  a bare existence separated from the land they can only pray for work and perhaps a little charity.

But even "aid" from the imperialists is only used as a method for greater debt enslavement. Especially that "aid" from that superpower that uses its Dollar hegemony to print and  pass out its printed rag paper As aid and demand repayment in real goods. This is a worldwide criminal scam for robbing the poor of the world that is managed by the World Bank and International Monetary  Fund, institutions  that work to turn countries into export of wealth economies. That  is ,economically enslaved cheap labour export economies ,for the benefit of the rich imperialist countries.

  This exploitation of nature for quick capitalist profits  is a problem of capitalism that much concerned early environmentalist  thinkers like Marx ,who was much concerned with productivity and the depletion of the soil by capitalist farming methods  and about the resulting organising og human social relations and society.
 -The contradiction between town and country -that Mao attempted to solve with helping the people to create Communes with local industries etc.
For Marxists, an analogous effort has taken place, which seeks to discover either explicit or implicit concerns with nature in the central body of Marx's work. Foster has come up with some very interesting insights into the rather explicit concern that Marx had with the central ecological crisis of the 19th century: soil fertility.
There is actually a long tradition of Marxist research into agrarian questions going back to Marx and Engels. Lenin and Kautsky also wrote important articles on the question.

 Michael Perelman, the moderator of PEN-L, has also written on the topic: "Farming For Profit In A Hungry World: Capital And The Crisis In Agriculture." I plan to read and report on this book before long.
The context for Marx's examination of the agrarian question was the general crisis of soil fertility in the period from 1830 to 1870. The depletion of soil nutrients was being felt everywhere, as capitalist agriculture broke down the old organic interaction that took place on small, family farms. When a peasant plowed a field with ox or horse-drawn plows, used an outhouse, accumulated compost piles, etc., the soil's nutrients were replenished naturally. As capitalist agriculture turned the peasant into an urban proletariat, segregated livestock production from grain and food production, the organic cycle was broken and the soil gradually lost its fertility.
The need to artificially replenish the soil's nutrients led to scientific research into the problem. Justin Von Liebeg was one of the most important thinkers of the day and he was the first to posit the problem in terms of the separation between the city and the countryside.

While the research proceeded, the various capitalist powers sought to gain control over new sources of fertilizers. This explains "guano imperialism," which I referred to in my post on Peru the other day. England brought Peru into its neocolonial orbit because it was the most naturally endowed supplier of bird dung in the world. In 1847, 227 thousand tons of guano were imported from Peru into England. This commodity was as important to England's economy as silver and gold were in previous centuriesThere was also a desperate search for bones. Over a ten year period, the value of English imports rose from 14,000 pound sterling to 254,000. Raiding parties were dispatched to battlefields to scavenge bodies of dead soldiers. Their bones were desperately needed to replenish sterile soil.

The United States followed suit. There had been a big crisis in upstate NY and the mid-Atlantic states in the mid 1800s. This prompted Congress to pass the "Guano Act" of 1856, which eventually led to the seizure of 94 islands in the Pacific Ocean, rich sources of guano.

Von Liebeg theorized that such measures would eventually fall short. Even with such substitutes, the soil tended to lose its nutrient properties so long as the artificial divide between town and countryside was maintained. Not only was the countryside losing its productivity, the town was being swamped with human waste which was no longer being recycled. London had such a terrible problem with open sewers that Parliament was forced to relocate to a location outside the city during the summer months. The stench was unbearable.

The neo-Classical economists tended to view soil fertility as a given, like some kind of natural law. Ricardo and Malthus both regarded it as an exhaustible resource. Thus, the problem of overpopulation was tightly coupled to the existing practices of capitalist agriculture, which was to exploit the soil and then abandon it when it lost its fertility. This has been the main character of Malthusianism until the modern era. It accepts the limits imposed by the capitalist mode of production as eternal.
Scientists like Von Liebeg, on the other hand, supported the notion of soil improvement.

This meant looking at the relationship between society and nature in ecological terms. The solution to the problem was the reintegration of the town and country. This overlapped with Marx's own exploration of the problems in Capital. In volume three of Capital, the discussion of farming is framed within this general dialectic. Soil fertility could only be ensured over the long run through the abolition of the capitalist system, which would allow food production to take place along sound, ecological guidelines.

http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/foster281107.html

In addressing these environmental issues Marx took over the concept  of Stoffwechsel or metabolism from Liebig, describing the ecological contradiction between nature and capitalist society as  "an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social 
metabolism."  Indeed, "capitalist production," Marx explained, "only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social 
process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth -- the soil and the worker."  This rift in the  metabolic relation between humanity and nature could only be overcome, he argued, through the systematic "restoration" of the metabolism between humanity and nature "as a regulative law of 
social organization."  But this required the rational regulation of the labor process (itself defined as the metabolic relation of human beings to nature) by the associated producers in line with the needs  of future generations. 

 "Even an entire society, a nation, or all 
 simultaneously existing societies taken together," Marx stated, "are  not owners of the earth.  They are simply its possessors, its  beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the  household]."

Here Marx points out the twin original
 sources of all wealth -- the soil and the worker."
and also the interrelated twin contradictions of the people with exploitative capitalism.

The concluding paragraphs of the chapter on "The Transformation of Surplus Profit into Ground-Rent" in V. 3 of Capital are relevant.

"All criticism of small-scale landownership is ultimately reducible to criticism of private property as a barrier and obstacle to agriculture. So too is all counter-criticism of large landed property. Secondary political considerations are of course left aside here in both cases. It is simply that this barrier and obstacle which all private property in land places to agricultural production and the rational treatment, maintenance and improvement of the land itself, develops in various forms, and in quarreling over these specific forms of the evil its ultimate root is forgotten.

"Small-scale landownership presupposes that the overwhelming majority of the population is agricultural and that isolated labour predominates over social; wealth and the development of reproduction, therefore, both in its material and intellectual aspects, is ruled out under these circumstances, and with this also the conditions for a rational agriculture.

On the other hand, large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an every growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country.

"If small-scale landownership creates a class of barbarians standing half outside society, combining all the crudity of primitive social forms with all the torments and misery of civilized countries, large landed property undermines labor-power in the final sphere to which its indigenous energy flees, and where it is stored up as a reserve fund for renewing the vital power of the nation, on the land itself. Large-scale industry and industrially pursued large-scale agriculture have the same effect. If they are originally distinguished by the fact that the former lays waste and ruins labour-power and thus the natural power of man, whereas the latter does the same to the natural power of the soil, they link up in the later course of development, since the industrial system applied to agriculture also enervates the workers there, while industry and trade for their part provide agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil."

Now in the long run only socialism can save humanity and build a decent world with a living environment suitable for humans utilising modern science sensibly including bio diesels and other bio fuels. But right now in most cases in this human emergency bio DIEsals an out of control  human killer for imperialist profit running roughshod over humanity that must be bought under control and fast.

There are two sources of new wealth labour and nature.
Capital, past accumulated  weath -dead labour- does not just have an exploitative relation to labour that utilises the materials provided by the human environment, but an exploitative relation to that nature it calls its property too.

This has been called the second contradiction of capitalism it's a contradiction not just with the labouring people but with humanity as a whole. Some environmentalists now say that the second contradiction is even more important than the first because it now threatens the very existence of all humanity.

Capitalist imperialism , organises production and humanity itself for its profit making purposes and determines  distribution of the product and surplus value it seizes in the production of commodities.
It may suit its purposes to bribe the unproductive  "workers" in the imperialist distribution system with a cut in the surplus value profits won in exploiting the cheap labour workers like those in China. The price of labour mechanism plays a role in disguising this re-distribution of wealth .

The high waged  imperialist workers, mostly white skinned but now resembling privileged 'house Blacks ".in a slave society .

It is said they are much more productive and create more wealth with their more valuable labour especially in the  unproductive services sector than 50 cents an hour materially productive commodity producing third world 'field blacks ".

 In this way these unexploited imperialist heartland "workers". An unexploited  labour aristocracy  may become enthusiastic even rabid supporters of imperialism and volunteers  for its wars against third world peoples.
  

The principle active contradiction in the world today is the contradiction between the oppressed peoples of the world and imperialism.
This contradiction may be fought out in national independence and environmental struggle forms in areas where the second contradiction comes to the forefont of peoples needs.

Some of these national independence and for food security struggles and defence against imperialist  oil wars for cheap oil struggles  , are painted by the imperialists and their bribed militarist labour aristocracy partners as purely religious wars by crazy Muslims. 

Principal Source and Related.

http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/foster281107.html

Destroying African Agriculture By Walden Bello
http://sydney.indymedia.org.au/story/destroying-african-agriculture-walden-bello