The reality behind Brazilian Biofuels in New Zealand
Visit arrangements: Padre Thorlby will be in Wellington from April 18 to 25 on the invitation of the Pacific Institute of Resource Management. Contact Kay Weir at Tel 04 939 4553 or 389 5384 or e-mail pirmeditor@paradise.net.nz. Talk at VUW April 19 - Padre Thorlby will also be speaking Victoria University on Monday evening, April 19 – email john.overton@vuw.ac.nz
Background to the issue: See Padre Thorlby’s article in Pacific Ecologist at http://www.pacificecologist.org/archive/17/
http://www.greenlaunches.com/entry_images/0608/06/sugar-cane_cutters.jpg
Notes on Padre Tiago Thorlby Padre Thorlby, also known as James Thorlby, is a Scots priest who has worked with landless people, homesteaders and sugarcane workers in Brazil for 25 years with the ecumenical Church organisation, The Pastoral Land Commission, the CPT, Comissao Pastoral da Terra, in Pernambuco, north-east, Brazil. The CPT is an agency of the Bishop's Conference in Brazil. The Brazilian government awarded the CPT the Human Rights Award 2003 in the Eradication of Slave Labour category for its work to combat slave labour throughout the country. Thorlby says biofuels produced in Brazil for the rich world’s cars, are creating a catastrophe. To say biofuels produced for ever increasing exports from Brazil are “clean, sustainable” is an attack on Nature and a crime against those expelled from the land, he says in an article in Pacific Ecologist issue 17. Instead, Brazil's massive "latifundia" style sugar-ethanol farms destroy the environment and undermine local food security. The CPT was one of several Brazilian civil rights and social justice organisations which contributed to two reports on biofuels, published in Brazil: Agroenergy Myths & Impacts in Latin America, published in October 2007 and Food & Energy Sovereignty Now :Brazilian Grassroots Position on Agroenergy., published February 2008.
The NZ government, advised by the EECA, our Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority, has developed a policy of introducing “sustainable biofuels” from Brazil into NZ petrol stations under a sustainability option and they are currently sold in several Mobil petrol stations around NZ particularly in the Wellington region. But millions of farmers in third world countries, including in Brazil, know they are not sustainable at all. There is a clear possibility we will soon have a huge amount of biofuels in petrol stations which will be a human rights and environmental horror story masquerading as sustainable. EECA is holding a conference on 21 April this year on Biofuels and Electric Cars. A speaker on biofuels at this conference will be Elizabeth Beall, from the (green-washing) Roundtable for Sustainable Biofuels, who has also worked for the Inter-American Development Bank, which promotes biofuels, particularly from Latin American countries. We are holding our meeting on 22 April to address the human rights and ecological issues not being addressed at the EECA conference.
Meeting supported by The Latin American Solidarity Committee, LAC, The Alternative Technology & Living Association, and Friends of the Earth, NZ.