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CLIMATE CHANGE: Lula Calls for Flexibility from Rich Countries

Mario Osava

BRASILIA, Feb 21 2008 (IPS) - Industrialised nations must live up to their Kyoto Protocol commitments and be flexible in trade negotiations in order for the world to make progress towards solutions to climate change and to prevent the poor from being steeped in poverty for a long time to come, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said Thursday.

In his speech to the 130 parliamentarians taking part in the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment (GLOBE) forum held Wednesday and Thursday in the Brazilian capital, Lula rigorously defended biofuels as an alternative that combines climate change mitigation with poverty alleviation.

Of the world’s 50 poorest countries, 38 are net importers of oil, which means they are hit especially hard by the current high oil prices, he pointed out.

"Agroenergy offers a historic opportunity," in this period of transition to new energy sources, to "improve the distribution of global wealth" by combining energy security with social aspects like the generation of jobs and income among the poor in the world’s developing countries, he argued.

But it is "a revolution that will only take place if rich countries open their markets, reducing their farm subsidies," he added.

That is a long-standing demand of developing countries which have failed to obtain a satisfactory response from the United States, the European Union and Japan in the Doha Round of World Trade Organisation multilateral talks on the liberalisation of trade, which have stalled as a result.

Lula rejected arguments that biofuels reduce the amount of land available for food production, noting that Brazil has 60 million hectares of unused grasslands that have already been deforested and no longer serve as pasture for livestock but can be "recuperated" for the cultivation of sugar cane and oilseeds to produce biodiesel.

The ethanol produced by Brazil currently makes up one-third of the vehicle fuel used in this country, which also exports more than three billion litres a year. And the crops used to produce ethanol are grown on less then four million hectares of land.

In addition, the productivity of the industry has increased fourfold since 1975, when Brazil launched its national programme to replace gasoline with sugar cane ethanol, said Lula, who added that productivity continues to grow.

"Agflation," the phenomenon of food prices driving up consumer prices around the world, is due more to the rise in consumption in China, India and other less populous countries as people’s incomes there increase, he maintained, in response to complaints that the use of grains for producing ethanol and biodiesel is pushing up farm prices.

Much of the criticism of biofuels is due more to the use of maize, grains and beetroot for producing ethanol and biodiesel in the United States and the European Union, with high levels of subsidies and tariffs. That is hindering the development of biofuels and, thus, the fight against poverty in poor tropical countries in Africa and Central America, he asserted.

Both Lula and Brazil’s Environment Minister Marina Silva took advantage of the GLOBE forum to explain the measures that the government has adopted to successfully curb deforestation in the Amazon jungle and to defend Brazil’s proposal for a fund to remunerate environmental services like preserving tropical forests.

The legislators taking part in the two-day meeting were from the G8+5, which is made up of the G8 industrialised nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States), plus the five leading emerging economies (Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa).

The forum was organised by GLOBE and the Alliance of Communicators for Sustainable Development (COM+), a partnership of international organisations like the World Bank and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), as well as news agencies like IPS (Inter Press Service) and Britain’s BBC.

Biofuels and forests were the central focus of the two-day gathering which approved recommendations to be presented at the July G8 summit in Japan.

But no agreement was reached on the broader issue: a framework for a post-2012 agreement on climate change, which will continue to be debated ahead of the summit.

The question of biofuels was the most controversial and hotly debated, due to the presence of top Brazilian officials as well as representatives of companies like the state-run Petrobrás, which has expanded into other sectors of the energy industry, and the Brazilian Sugar Cane Industry Association (UNICA), all of which are interested in seeing the world’s big markets open up to a product that only Brazil is in a position to export on a large-scale, in the short-term.

But Brazil’s efforts at persuasion did not prevent the lawmakers from approving a document that was watered down compared to the initial proposal. The final document recognises Brazil’s leadership in ethanol production, but says that further expansion of trade in ethanol must be subject to international certification.

The debate highlighted doubts about the effectiveness of biofuels in mitigating climate change, as well as the risks of greater food shortages in many countries, by making arable land for growing food scarcer, and by diverting food grains to fuel production. These concerns prompted long-winded arguments by Lula and other Brazilians in favour of distilling ethanol from sugarcane, which is more efficient than the raw materials used in the United States and Europe, where they are subsidised and protected.

The Brazilian representatives insisted that in poor tropical countries, in Africa for instance, there is plenty of land available, and that biofuel production could contribute significantly to alleviating poverty, the main cause of hunger.

The existence of regulations and certification procedures for forestry products made it easier for the legislators to reach agreement on recommendations on how to combat illegal logging.

The forum’s proposals to the G8 Summit include the creation of a global system to recognise national regulatory mechanisms for legal timber, reinforcement of legal, sustainable markets for wood, and increasing funding for activities such as forest management.

The concept is that measures taken by the G8 would be decisive for promoting legal, transparent and sustainable use of wood world-wide.

Minister Silva stressed that Brazil has reduced deforestation in the Amazon by 59 percent in the past three years, and said she was confident that the rise recorded in the last few months could be reversed by cracking down on illegal loggers, and by "restructuring" measures intended to make it more profitable to maintain standing forests than to fell trees to make room for crops and livestock.

During the debates, many legislators took the opportunity to defend their own countries.

The head of the Chinese delegation complained about misleading information, saying that 30 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions blamed on his country were generated abroad by the production of components that are assembled in China.

Edward Markey emphasised recent measures taken by the United States, such as requirements for greater fuel efficiency in cars, and large investments in research on production of biofuels from cellulose.

But Lula, who was due to address the opening session of the Forum, chose to have the last word instead, and attended only the penultimate session.

He accused industrialised countries of falling down on their commitments enshrined in the Kyoto Protocol, and said they were hindering initiatives such as biofuels which, he argued, contribute to energy security, mitigation of climate change and poverty reduction, and thus to a more balanced world.