Fair-traded biofuels

In the spotlights of the global climate debate, another, "huge one", is gaining strength and remainding us time and time again that unless coordinated, fair and system-approaches are employed, the world will face huge risks of conflict.

Certainly, it concerns the global agricultural sector that has been and will continue to modify itself depending on the global urban demand. As China and India progresses economically, the meat demand is increasing, influencing a change of farming. Needless to mention the West´s enormous meat consumption, the recent increased demand of "biofuels", (almost exclusively unsustainable ethanol), has commonly resulted that the worlds foodstuff prices have increased by 30% during only the last 6 months!

The strategies for managing emerging agromarkets, such as the huge continent of Africa, differ strongly among various stakeholders. Swedens foreign minister, Mr. Carl Bildt, has personally declared that there is significant risks that we might experience food riots in the near future. Meanwhile, the Swedish Cooperative Centre, helping people for self-help in third world countries since 1958, recently published a report stating that biofuel production from Africa specifically might bring a promising potential in combating poverty. Ensuring a rural worker more in payment through cultivation of energy crops will acertain offspring in educational participation, increasing economic ensurance against diseases and maintaining an "alive" rural side - as long as it is managed socially and environmentally sustainable (conclusions from the report).

However, as it was discussed during the TGR show with Martina Krüger (071209) from Greenpeace, there have been obvious extraction and marketing mismanagements of biofuels in many cases. Apart from not sufficiently benefitting the local community from which the energy crop is cultivated and extracted, no significant considerations are given to the biological multitude (sacrificing precious rainforests) and the ecosystem-services that the subjected biohabitats provide (both for us humans and for all other living creatures). And, interestingly, as Peter Roberntz, WWF, points out: there is a tendency to avoid environmental requirements of biohabitats for the sake of climate relief... Everything is connected...

Not to mention - what is actually hindering a continuation of neo-colonial structures of biofuel/monetary exchange between North/West and South/East when we already live in a world where huge amounts of natural resources are shovelled out from Africa, increasing in value in Europe/North America/Japan/China?

Fair traded & organic produced biofuels
Climate labelled fruites
Sustainable fished fish

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