The Biofuels Deception: Going Hungry on the Green Carbon Diet

Okbazghi Yohannes catalogues, with precision and prescience, the harmful effects of the “Geoeconomics of Biofuels” production and global poverty. The Biofuels Deception—masterfully assembled, intellectually enriching, and skillfully narrated—defines the numbing side effects of cold sciences, mobilized for the capitalization of biofuels, which results in the retrenching of Third World poverty and “capital accumulation” for transnational conglomerates.

—Tseggai Isaac, Professor of Political Science, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla

This book provides a powerful challenge to the claims by the biofuel-biotechnology industrial complex and its corporate intellectuals that the production of biofuels enhances global security in food and energy and mitigates global climate change. It counters such a claim with rich empirical evidence that shows how the competition between the production of food and biofuels harms global food security, worsens poverty and the plight of the global poor and does little to reduce climate change. Beyond challenging the prevailing dominant vision, it advances the development of a counter epistemology of agro-ecology, which is a crucial precondition for advancing food and energy security and climate change reduction. It is an essential read for people interested in the relations between the production of biofuels and food and energy security, global poverty, and global warming.

—Kidane Mengisteab, Professor of African Studies and Political Science, Pennsylvania State University, University Park

Yohannes offers a comprehensive assessment of the complex social, political, and ecological relationships associated with biofuel development. From the Green Revolution to the Gene Revolution, from agrofuels to bioplastics, capital is systematically robbing the world, undermining environmental sustainability for the sake of private riches. The Biofuels Deception unmasks the corporate interests furthering the commercialization of nature, illuminating how agrofuel development contributes to food shortages, climate change, and soil and water degradation. It contributes to our understanding of the larger system and the planetary emergency that we must confront.

—Brett Clark, Associate Professor, University of Utah; author, The Tragedy of the Commodity and The Ecological Rift