Francois Souty is not directly concerned by land use change linked to the production of bio-fuels. However: with a PhD, he’s working on how to balance food crops and crops for energy as well as assessing the impact of food and energy/land-use spaces on deforestation. His goal: working on how to match food/energetic needs and preserving an environmental balance.
The CIRED is the Centre International de Recherche sur l’Environnement et le Développement.
Q1. Is the surface of crops devoted to bio-energies important in Brazil?
Sugar cane is an agricultural input. Used to both produce sugar and bio-energies. Huge in Brazil and the proportion of sugar cane devoted to energies is getting more and more important.
Q2. Does the culture of crops devoted to bio-energies imply a certain level of pollution?
A- If so, what type of pollution is in cause?
Fertilizers: not well assessed. But scientists agree on saying that fertilizers are polluting. But do not agree on the quantification. Anyway: question: how much fertilizers for how much rejection?
What is better measurable:
*Level of CO2 is highly controversial → how to undermine this type of pollution inherent to the current scheme of bio-energies production?
*Sugar cane: profitable but very polluting when transformed into energy. Study conducted in the US: negative spending = sugar cane production rejects more pollution than the subsequent bio-energy spares. Other gases: nitrogen protoxide, CO2. And Chlorine fedone: highly toxic.
(Good to read: Dominique Belpomme: says that agricultural soils are highly polluted by chemical substances used as fertilizers.
B- Can it have impacts on individuals’ health? On animal’s health? On the environmental balance?
*On animals: To read: very interesting: Agrocarburants: Impact au Sud. Brazil does not provide much importance to the potential danger of fertilizers devoted to land use for bio fuels. Land use contamination is not negligeable but not precisely assessed. What is sure: pollution of rivers, which harms the bio-diversity: proof: nitrogen has been found in the Amazon estuary (Brazil) in very high quantities. Idem in Saint-Brieuc Bay with the seaweeds. Land use contamination can be more seen under this environmental perspective.
*On human beings: nitrates are very dangerous.
MDRGF (Mouvement pour le Droit et le Respect des Générations Futures): studies the toxicity of pesticides and points out that farmers are the first concerned by land-use contamination.
Q3. Is this kind of pollution a fatality or are there solutions possible to avoid it?
It is not a fatality in the sense that one can always stop the bio-fuel production if revealed as encompassing more negative than positive effects. Pollution-free solutions can certainly be found according to F. Souty, but their profitability would be inferior, and the bio-fuel production is inscribed in an economic logic.
F. Souty states that it is better to start by reducing pollution emissions than to bet on sustainable energies the negative aftermaths of which we are even not sure of.
Q4. Is the Brazilian case unique? Is it the most relevant when it comes to this issue?
Brazil: high economic logic. Why is bio-energies production and crops so important? The government entices the development of elements serving to the production of bio fuels for the sake of economic growth, of search of positive trade balance, and of human development (access to bio-energies for maximum of Brazilians). Brazil: special case given its soaring economy: France: totally different logic because not the same economic situation.
Francois Souty thinks that the production of bio energies is first to make money. Plus, foreign countries are accomplices of this, because buying Brazilian bio-energies. The way to consider this production has to be revised as too much seen under the perspective of profitability in an international perspective.
All the people involved in the production of bio energies have to think if it is sustainable.
People are skeptical when it comes to the use of bio fuels, because finding it too expensive.