The Bioeconomy: A Primer

Key Points

• The bioeconomy is industry’s response to current global social, environmental, and economic challenges including climate change, food insecurity, and natural resource shortages. In the bioeconomy, ‘renewable’ biological resources are used to replace fossil fuels as well as for food, animal feed, and other bio-based products.
• The bioeconomy agenda has been developed by powerful corporations and is being pushed by EU and G7 member states. It is closely linked to the ‘green economy’ and the Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy.
• Over the past few years, the bioeconomy’s focus on agrofuels has stimulated land grabbing in the Global South. Agricultural land providing food for local people is being converted to agrofuel monocultures, causing numerous negative economic, social, and environmental impacts.
• An additional flaw is that decreased emissions are greatly overestimated: while the EU’s dependence on biomass imports has continued to grow, the bioeconomy has simply expanded without a parallel decreased reliance on fossil fuels.
• By prioritising market growth over environmental health and social wellbeing, the bioeconomy agenda ignores the necessity of reducing high levels of consumption, which is the primary cause of resource depletion worldwide.
• Ultimately, agrofuels appear to have more negative impacts than the fossil fuels they are supposed to replace, particularly in terms of lost land, resource access, livelihoods, and food security in the Global South.
• It is thus critical that other perspectives are also considered, for example ‘agroecology’, which supports the relocalisation of food and energy production as well as autonomous decision-making by farmers.

Introduction

The bioeconomy agenda emerged in response to the need to find alternatives to fossil fuels. The idea is based on increasing the use of biotechnologies and biofuels, and is a response to growing concerns about the unsustainable use and management of finite natural resources. The bioeconomy is based on the premise that achieving a better balance between biological resources and human economic activities is generally problem-free.

However, the way in which powerful corporate forces are defining and driving this agenda is highly problematic. In particular, the impact on agricultural land is of critical importance, as the increasing production of agrofuel crops entails land being shifted away from food production.

This report traces the emergence and the current trajectory of the bioeconomy. It highlights how corporate interests have managed to capture and dominate its development and growth. It raises a number of key questions in the hope that they will contribute to a debate: does the current approach to the bioeconomy need to be completely rejected as an inherently destructive agenda? Or does the idea of the bioeconomy have enough potential that it should be reclaimed and restructured?

What is the bioeconomy?

According to the European Bioeconomy Panel 1, the bioeconomy includes the production and use of renewable biological resources as well as economic activities, both within and between countries, related to the invention, development, production and use of biological products and processes. This includes the production of food and non-food agricultural crops, and the technological processes that turn them into food, feed, bio-based products, agrofuels, and bioenergy. More specifically, the bioeconomy encapsulates numerous sectors: agriculture, forestry, fisheries, construction, food processing, pulp and paper, biotechnology, environmental technology, industrial goods, textiles, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, and recycling and waste collection. 2

Concerns about resource sustainability are growing, particularly in regard to food scarcity and food security; limited national (or global) capacity to produce goods; climate change; and environmental degradation. 3 The bioeconomy presents biotechnologies (processes that use and manipulate biological systems and organisms to develop new products) and biomass (material produced from vegetable or animal matter), as solutions for global resource shortages. The European Bioeconomy Panel is engaged in several projects to this end: for example, processing plants that use hydrothermal carbonisation processes to convert agricultural pulp waste into char.4

5Governments worldwide are increasingly focusing on the development of national and international bioeconomies in order to address a growing number of major social, environmental and economic challenges. These bioeconomies purportedly create new employment opportunities, assist in climate change mitigation, and promote resource efficiency. Concurrent to the rise of this corporate-driven bio-based strategy, societies across the planet are struggling with converging crises in the areas of food, energy, climate and finance.6 These multiple and interlinked crises are influencing policy decisions and governance in the agricultural, forestry, fisheries and aquaculture sectors, and by extension impacting people who earn their livelihoods in these areas.

10The European Commission has praised the EU’s growing bioeconomy as a demonstration of its member states’ engagement with the regional ‘green economy’ agenda, catalysed in the early 2000s through the active promotion of bioenergy and a widespread transformation toward agrofuels (see Box 4). Yet more than a decade into this experiment, scientific, academic and grassroots research increasingly exposes its flawed claims. Most importantly, decreased emissions are greatly overestimated. Furthermore, agrofuels have more negative impacts than the fossil fuels they are supposed to replace, particularly in terms of lost land, resource access, livelihoods, and food security in the Global South (see Box 8).11

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