Food shortages, part 2: Corporate power - Agrofuels and the expansion of agribusiness

[Hannah Bell]

GRAIN

The wave of investment in agrofuels is restructuring agribusiness itself. New, powerful players are converging into the sector. Cosmetics corporations are selling biodiesel. Big oil is buying up plantations. Wall Street speculators are swinging deals with feudal sugar barons. All of this money circulating around the globe is reorganising and intensifying transnational structures, linking the most brutal landowning class of the South with the most powerful corporations of the North.

This article looks at the expanding corporate investment in and control over agrofuels. It provides an overview of who is investing in agrofuels and where the money is going, shedding light on how the development of this alternative fuel, promoted for its environmental advantages and the economic benefits it brings to farmers, is already being managed by transnational corporations and absorbed into their profit strategies and expansion plans.

So who’s investing in all this new construction?

http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=478

[flashl]

1. Its a lose-lose scenario.

Same players in agrofuel and another biotech development, the "terminator seed".