CALL ON U.S. GOVERNMENT TO HALT ECOLOGICALLY MISGUIDED SUPPORT FOR LARGE SCALE BIOFUEL

COMMENTARY ARCHIVES, 30 Mar 2009

TMS Editor

Please support US environmental and social justice groups calling upon the new Obama administration to halt financial and policy support for large scale biofuel production. In particular, the Obama government‘s potential support for agrofuel expansion — making of transportation fuels from food — runs counter to their aim to urgently address climate change and threatens to cause more deforestation, hunger, human rights abuses, and degradation of soil and water.

The Obama administration promised to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to boost renewable energy. Unfortunately, a large part of their solution involves further boosting agrofuel production, both in the US and abroad. The new administration must heed the overwhelming evidence that agrofuels worsen climate change through further deforestation and the destruction of other ecosystems; drive food prices up, forcing more and more people worldwide into hunger and malnutrition; and decimate biodiversity and ecosystems.

Rainforest Rescue (Rettet den Regenwald) is concerned with America‘s growing ethanol industry, and the implications it has in setting a precedent for massive agricultural industrialisation of the world‘s remaining rainforests and other natural wildlands. We concur with the growing ecological consensus that large-scale industrial production of transport fuels and other energy from plants such as corn, sugar cane, oil palm, soya, trees, grasses, or so-called agricultural and woodland waste threatens forests, biodiversity, food sovereignty, community-based land rights and will worsen climate change.

TO TAKE ACTION PLEASE CLICK – RAINFOREST RESCUE

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 30 Mar 2009.

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