The African Center for Biosafety (ACB) has issued a statement to express concerns over the possibility of the inclusion of maize in a revision of South Africa's biofuels policy. ACB was prompted into action by an announcement made by the Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF), Tina Joemat-Petersson, earlier in the month. ACB says the Minister's stance has been “influenced by the huge surplus of conventional and GM maize produced by South African farmers this season and the difficulty encountered by them to find markets for this maize”. However, a policy shift would renege on prior government commitments to exclude maize for biofuels due to food security reasons, ACB said. It added there has been intense lobbying by the industry and the Portfolio Committee on Energy to make that happen. “The looming financial crisis among South African maize farmers further attests to the folly of mortgaging the country's future on the mass production of global commodities that can be bought and sold at the whim of financial speculators,” said Mariam Mayet, ACB's director. “The use of maize as feedstock for agrofuels has contributed to massive hikes in the price of food on the global market. The 2008 global food crisis was largely attributable to the diversion of maize in the US to ethanol production,” added ACB's Haidee Swanby. The organization made a call for the government to support environmentally sound agricultural practices for local consumption and stop opening up so-called ‘marginal lands' to an industrialized agricultural model that leads to ‘climate chaos and chronic global hunger'. “Civil society and local communities will continue to strongly oppose any attempts to compromise food security and risk increases in food prices in order to protect the interests of the agro-fuel lobby,” said Mayet. Pro-biofuel experts counter-argue that bioenergy offers “the biggest and most secure market for agriculture in southern Africa and could help ease the region's electricity woes in the future”, according to a Reuters report. The country intends to generate 15 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. BM
