Agrofuels in the food regime

Abstract

The biofuels rush represents the continued externalisation of capitalism's costs, through the distraction of green fuel. This essay argues that the agrarian question has been posed as a distinctive problematic across the three so-called ‘food regimes’ associated with high colonialism, developmentalism, and neoliberalism – and that the third form of the agrarian question is revealing most visibly the contradictions of the commodification of food and fuel crops. These contradictions are clearest in their developmental (and climatic) effects in biofuel expansion at the expense of human habitats and ecologies; as well as in reducing ecological processes to a price metric to facilitate carbon trading, but revealing the incommensurabilities of carbon flows and, therefore, the shortcomings of market environmentalism as a proponent of greening accumulation with biofuels.