Biofuel imaginaries:the emerging politics surrounding ‘inclusive’ private sector development in Madagascar

Biofuels are just one of a host of bioeconomy initiatives which promise to deliver ‘inclusive’ sustainable development through innovations in bio-based products and services in the global south. Yet to critics, biofuels are seen as prime drivers in a global ‘land grab,’ rainforest clearance, and the dispossession of farmers. Responding to these concerns, firms in Madagascar have shifted production away from large plantations to small-scale production of the more ‘environmentally-friendly’ biofuel crop Jatropha curcas. Using a political ecology lens and building upon critical discourse analysis found in cultural political economy, I analyse perspectives of on the material effects and emerging politics surrounding a case of a British-biofuel start-up firm in the northwest Madagascar. I demonstrate that access to biofuel land and labour is dependent upon the inclusion of Malagasy in rural development projects. However, rather than delivering on the promises of biofuels, jatropha has largely emerged as a failed development strategy. This article examines the unaccounted for power that varied and diverse actors derive by promoting the inclusion of individuals and groups to share in benefits, and the material consequences of private sector development in the global south

A human right to science?:precarious labor and basic rights in science and bioprospecting

Does everyone have the right to benefit from science? If so, what shape should benefits take? This article exposes the inequalities involved in bioprospecting through a relatively neglected human right, the right to benefit from science (HRS). Although underexplored in the literature, it is acknowledged that market-based conservation practices, such as bioprospecting, often rely on cheap “casual” labor. In contrast to critical discourses exposing the exploitation and misappropriation of indigenous people's cultural and self-determination rights in relation to bioprospecting (i.e., biopiracy), the exploitation of a low-skilled labor force for science has been little examined from a human rights perspective. Reliance on cheap labor is not limited just to those directly involved in creating local biodiversity inventories but constitutes a whole set of other workers (cooks, porters, and logistical support staff), who contribute indirectly to the advancements of science and whose contribution is barely acknowledged, let alone financially remunerated. As precarious workers, it is difficult for laborers to use existing national and international labor laws to fight for recognition of their basic rights or easily to rely on biodiversity and environmental laws to negotiate recognition of their contribution to science. We explore to what extent the HRS can be used to encourage governments, civil society, and companies to provide basic labor and social rights to science. This should be of keen interest to geographers, who for the most part have limited engagement in human rights law, and has wider significance for those interested in exploitative labor and rights violations in the emerging bio- and green economy

Peri-urban land grabbing?:dilemmas of formalising tenure and land acquisitions around the cities of Bamako and Ségou, Mali

This brief note identifies the consequences of land acquisitions in peri-urban spaces around the cities of Bamako and Ségou, Mali. This contributes to debates surrounding the rapid expansion of African cities faced with rapid rural-urban migration and new arrivals settling in precarious conditions. West Africa has a long history of urbanisation, in some cases accompanied by highly productive and intensified land use. It is, therefore, vitally important to question whether formal property rights within peri-urban spaces are a viable option to secure rights for those most marginal and/or recently disposed of their rural land holdings. What are some alternative formalisation mechanisms, which avoid the hazards associated with formal titling, and address the precarious tenure conditions in peri-urban zones

Mapping value in a 'green' commodity frontier:revisiting commodity chain analysis

Analysis of commodity chains has provided important insights on how power, resource and market access mediate the distribution of benefits and risks. Given this analytical potential, Commodity Chain Analysis (CCA) is now being applied to the study of biofuels and carbon markets to gain systematic insight into the circumstances, relationships and transformations involved in their production and exchange. By building on and adapting this approach to three distinct case studies (biofuels in Madagascar and forest carbon in Cambodia and Laos), this article contributes new insights on the emergence of value within market environmentalism. The analysis highlights methodological challenges in applying CCA to commodified forms of nature, and the significance of knowledge and value negotiations. All three cases illustrate that it remains highly uncertain whether or not market exchange can ultimately be realized. As in the case of traditional commodities, pre-existing conditions of power and access shape modes of production and network configuration. Parallel and intersecting commodity networks (e.g. for land and timber) also require us to think beyond the traditional single-commodity focus. Thus, we call for an expanded analytical focus in applying CCA to non-material ‘green’ commodities that places greater emphasis on value negotiations and connections within new ‘commodity frontiers’

A New Sustainability Model for Measuring Changes in Power and Access in Global Commodity Chains

High-value agricultural commodities face substantial economic, environmental and social sustainability challenges. As a result, commodity industries are adopting sustainable supply- and value-chain models to make production more efficient, traceable and risk-averse. These top-down models often focus on giving higher prices to smallholder producers. While an important component of sustainability, this focus on farm-gate prices has shown mixed results in part because they are less effective in highlighting the asymmetrical power relationships and the socio-economic and ecological complexity in high-value commodity production. Here, we use a novel method to measure and visualise changes in smallholder power in Madagascar’s northeast ‘vanilla triangle’—home to about 80% of the world’s high quality vanilla. Our results reveal the paradox that during the recent price surge an overall increase in smallholders’ multi-dimensional power to access economic benefits was accompanied by a decrease in many other equally important measures of sustainability. This illustrates how effective models for understanding global sustainable commodity chains should incorporate smallholders' perspectives that often emphasise complexity and uncertainty, and which aims to increase power and access for producers across both high and low price points

Speaking Power to ‘Post-Truth’:Critical Political Ecology and the New Authoritarianism

Given a history in political ecology of challenging hegemonic “scientific” narratives concerning environmental problems, the current political moment presents a potent conundrum: how to (continue to) critically engage with narratives of environmental change while confronting the “populist” promotion of “alternative facts.” We ask how political ecologists might situate themselves vis-à-vis the presently growing power of contemporary authoritarian forms, highlighting how the latter operates through sociopolitical domains and beyond-human natures. We argue for a clear and conscious strategy of speaking power to post-truth, to enable two things. The first is to come to terms with an internal paradox of addressing those seeking to obfuscate or deny environmental degradation and social injustice, while retaining political ecology’s own historical critique of the privileged role of Western science and expert knowledge in determining dominant forms of environmental governance. This involves understanding post-truth, and its twin pillars of alternative facts and fake news, as operating politically by those regimes looking to shore up power, rather than as embodying a coherent mode of ontological reasoning regarding the nature of reality. Second, we differentiate post-truth from analyses affirming diversity in both knowledge and reality (i.e., epistemology and ontology, respectively) regarding the drivers of environmental change. This enables a critical confrontation of contemporary authoritarianism and still allows for a relevant and accessible political ecology that engages with marginalized populations likely to suffer most from the proliferation of post-truth politics

Bittersweet cocoa: Certification programmes in Ghana as battlegrounds for power, authority and legitimacy

Critical studies on the interlinkages of access, power and sustainability in high value tropical commodity systems are gaining traction in the academic literature. This article draws on access theory to examine how the distributional effects of a private sector certification programme on rural cocoa growing communities are bound up in the power relations between the state, private sector actors and smallholders in Ghana. The article is based on a qualitative case study approach involving 40 semi-structured interviews, 20 in-depth interviews and field observations conducted between 2018 and 2021. We found that the private sector firm certification incentives such as premiums, agronomic inputs and technical services are distributed unevenly, and also contribute to increased production costs, theft, unjust gender relations, and labour exploitation. We argue that the certification programmes obfuscate the deteriorating relations between the state and the farmers and enable the private firms to gain foothold and affirm their operational legitimacy and market links with smallholders. We conclude that revising the certification programmes would require market and institutional reform. The revision also needs to take into account the existing structural differences among farmers, and between the state and the market for better sustainable transitions