[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Perils of the Coming Sugar Economy

[Bill Totten]

by Hope Shand

Foreign Policy In Focus

www.fpif.org (October 10 2008)


Peak oil, skyrocketing fuel costs, and the climate crisis are driving
corporate enthusiasm for a "biological engineering revolution" that some
predict will dramatically transform industrial production of food,
energy, materials, medicine, and the ecosystem. Advocates of converging
technologies promise a greener, cleaner post-petroleum future, where the
production of economically important compounds depends not on fossil
fuels but on biological manufacturing platforms fueled by plant sugars.
It may sound sweet and clean. But the "sugar economy" will be the
catalyst for a corporate grab on all plant matter as well as the
destruction of biodiversity on a massive scale.

The future bioeconomy will rely on "extreme genetic engineering", a
suite of technologies currently in early stages of development. It
includes cheap and fast gene sequencing, made-to-order biological parts,
genome engineering and design, and nano-scale materials fabrication and
operating systems. The common denominator is that all these technologies
- biotech, nanotech, synthetic biology - involve engineering of living
organisms at the nano-scale. This technological convergence is also
driving a convergence of corporate power. New bioengineering
technologies attract billions of dollars in corporate funding from
energy, chemical, and agribusiness giants, including DuPont, BP, Shell,
Chevron, and Cargill.

The 21st century's bio-based future is called the "sugar economy", or
the "carbohydrate economy", because industrial production will be based
on biological feedstocks (agricultural crops, grasses, forest residues,
plant oils, algae, et cetera) whose sugars are extracted, fermented, and
converted into high-value chemicals, polymers or other molecular
building blocks. The director of Cargill's industrial bioproducts
division explains: "With advances in biotechnology, any chemical made
from the carbon in oil could be made from the carbon found in plants".

Biological engineering has the potential to affect virtually every
sector of the economy that relies on fossil fuels - not only
transportation fuels but also plastics, paints, cosmetics, adhesives,
carpets, textiles, and thousands more consumer products. Advocates
assure us that the "food vs fuel" debate will be irrelevant in the
future sugar economy because feedstocks will come from cheap and
plentiful "cellulosic biomass" - plant matter composed of cellulose
fibers (including crop residues such as rice straw, corn stalks, wheat
straw, and wood chips as well as dedicated "energy crops" such as
switchgrass, fast-growing trees, algae, and even municipal waste). The
giant stumbling block is that breaking down biological feedstocks into
sugar requires a lot of energy and traditional chemistry has failed to
provide a cost-effective process. Proponents insist that "next
generation" feedstocks will use old and new biotechnologies, as well as
breakthrough fermentation technologies, to succeed where chemistry failed.

Crystallizing Corporate Power

Eschewing fossil fuels as the planet's economic fulcrum won't happen
overnight. It's too soon to tell if sugarcoated visions of the
carbohydrate economy are mostly technological hype and hubris, or if
bio-based production processes can compete with their petrochemical
counterparts. Some of the world's largest corporations are beginning to
shift some production away from petrochemicals to bio-based processes.
The quest for the sugar economy is fueling high-dollar deals in the
university-industry complex, most notably the $500 million alliance
between BP and University of California, Berkeley. Unprecedented
corporate alliances also involve synthetic biology startups and some of
the world's largest corporations, including those in the oil,
pharmaceutical, chemical, agribusiness, automobile, and forest-product
industries. For example:

* Agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland Company and Metabolix formed
a joint venture (Telles Company) to commercialize bioplastics made from
corn sugar. The company's biorefinery will produce 110 million pounds of
plastic resin per year starting in late 2008.

* DuPont partnered with sugar giant Tate & Lyle and Genencor to develop
a commercial bio-based product - a fiber called "Sorona".

* BP is partnering with Mendel Biotechnologies to develop genetically
engineered perennial grass for fuel.

* Chevron has an agreement with synthetic biology startup Solazyme to
develop an industrial process to transform algae into diesel fuel.

* The US Department of Energy is investing $385 million in six
commercial-scale cellulosic biorefineries. Corporate partners include
Cargill, Dow, DuPont, Shell, and Iogen.

Today's industrial bio-economy focuses primarily on fuel, especially
ethanol and biodiesel. Nature Biotechnology's Emily Waltz explains: "The
market for fuels swamps that of chemical and material markets, and the
prospect of commanding just a piece of it is a draw that many
entrepreneurs, governments, and investors cannot resist". Since the
1970s, seventy percent of all US government funding for R&D in biomass
has gone to biofuels. In the United States, energy applications account
for 94% of fossil fuel consumption while petrochemicals account for the
rest.

Bio-Economic Research Associates predicts that bio-based chemical
processes could capture more than $70 billion in revenues by 2010 - more
than ten percent of the global chemical industry total. (One analyst
predicts that the market for bio-plastics will expand from $1 billion in
2007 to over $10 billion by 2020.) The biofuels sector could reach $40
billion by 2010 and $110 to 150 billion by 2020. Revenues from vaccines
developed with next-generation DNA technologies could reach $20 billion
by 2010.

Recent experience with industrial agrofuels offers a modern day parable
about the dangers of techno-fixes that are promoted as green and
sustainable solutions to peak oil and climate change. By mid-2008, even
some countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD) were admitting that industrial agrofuels have been a
tragic boondoggle that can't be remotely described as a socially or
ecologically sustainable response to climate change. Not only are
industrial agrofuels driving the world's poorest farmers off their land
and into deeper poverty, they are the single greatest factor
contributing to soaring food prices and have pushed over thirty million
additional people from subsistence to hunger. Recent scientific papers
conclude that industrial agrofuels are not arresting climate change but
accelerating it.

Synthetic Biology to the Rescue?

But techno-optimists aren't worried because there are plenty more fixes
on the launching pad. Venture capitalists, corporate titans, and the US
Department of Energy are betting that advances in the field of synthetic
biology - the creation of designer organisms built from synthetic DNA -
will overcome the technological bottlenecks that threaten to delay the
sugar economy. Synthetic biology, they tell us, will enable
next-generation cellulosic feedstocks to be far more efficient and
sustainable, and won't compete with land and resources needed to grow
conventional food crops.

Today, synthetic biologists are pursuing a variety of methods to
efficiently extract sugars from biomass feedstocks. For example, they
are trying to use synthetic microbes to break down cellulosic biomass,
and they are also converting microbial cells into "living chemical
factories" that manufacture new bio-based products.

Jump-started by US government subsidies - by 2022, US energy policy
dictates that 44% of US production of biofuels must come from cellulosic
feedstocks - venture capitalists and corporations are supporting
in-house R&D as well as alliances with synthetic biology startups.

Amyris Biotechnologies, a California-based synthetic biology startup,
aims to engineer new metabolic pathways in microbes so they will produce
novel or rare compounds. Although best known for its high-profile
efforts to coax engineered cells to produce an anti-malarial compound,
the company's primary goal is to modify the genetic pathways of yeast so
that it efficiently ferments sugars to produce longer chain molecules of
gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. In 2007, Amyris raised $70 million in
venture capital to develop synthetic fuel technology. In April 2008
Amyris announced a joint venture with Brazil's Crystalsev to
commercialize "advanced renewable fuels" made from sugarcane in 2010 -
including diesel, jet fuel, and gasoline. In the longer term, Amyris
wants to create new production pathways in engineered microbes to churn
out pharmaceuticals, flavors, fragrances, and nutraceuticals.

In September 2008 California-based synthetic biology company, Solazyme,
Inc, announced that it has successfully produced the world's first
microbial-derived jet fuel by engineering algae to produce oil in
fermentation tanks. The company describes it as the first step towards
achieving fuel alternatives on a large scale and claims that its
production process can employ a variety of non-food feedstocks,
including cellulosic materials such as agricultural residues and
high-productivity grasses.

DuPont already manufactures a sugar-based biomaterial via engineered
microbes. Using a proprietary process developed through partnerships
with Genentech and Tate & Lyle, the company engineers the cellular
machinery of an E coli bacterium so that it can ferment corn sugar to
produce 1,3 propanediol, the main ingredient in the company's popular
Sorona fiber. DuPont's goal is to one day produce Bio-PDO from
cellulosic plant material instead of milled corn. DuPont predicts that
Sorona, which can be turned into anything from underwear to carpeting,
will eventually replace nylon. Although Sorona fiber is neither
compostable nor biodegradable, DuPont boasts that it's environmentally
friendly because its production requires forty percent less energy and
results in twenty percent less greenhouse gas emissions than
petroleum-based propanediol. But it takes six million bushels of corn to
produce 100 million pounds of Bio-PDO - the estimated annual output of
DuPont's Tennessee-based (USA) bio-refinery. And that's just one example
of one biorefinery producing just one bio-based material for a single
year. In other words, synthetic biology's sugar-dependent biorefineries
will create a massive demand for agricultural feedstocks. According to
biotech industry estimates, a moderately sized commercial-scale
biorefinery requires a minimum of 500,000 acres of cropland (and its
residues or "wastes").

Synthetic biology's grand vision of a post-petroleum economy depends on
biomass - whether derived from "energy crops", trees, agricultural
"wastes", crop residues, or algae. If the vision of a sugar economy
advances, will all plant matter become a potential feedstock? Who
decides what qualifies as agricultural waste or residue? Whose land will
grow the feedstocks? An article in the February 2008 issue of Nature
suggests that synthetic biology approaches "might be tailored to
marginal lands [emphasis added] where the soil wouldn't support food crops".

The implications, especially for marginalized farming communities and
poor people in the South, are profound. At a May 2006 meeting of
synthetic biologists, Nobel laureate Dr Steven Chu pointed out that
there is "quite a bit" of arable land suitable for rain-fed energy
crops, and that Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa are areas best
suited for biomass generation. Failing to learn from the
first-generation agrofuel trainwreck, The Economist naïvely suggests
that "there's plenty of biomass to go around" and that "the world's
hitherto impoverished tropics may find themselves in the middle of an
unexpected and welcome industrial revolution".

Advocates of synthetic biology and the bio-based sugar economy assume
that unlimited supplies of cellulosic biomass will be available. But can
massive quantities of biomass be harvested sustainably without eroding
or degrading soils, destroying biodiversity, increasing food insecurity,
and displacing marginalized peoples? Can synthetic microbes work
predictably? Can they be safely contained and controlled? No one knows
the answers to these questions, but that's not curbing corporate
enthusiasm. In the current social and economic context, the global grab
for next-generation cellulosic feedstocks threatens to repeat the
mistakes of first-generation agrofuels on a massive scale.

The pattern is familiar. Once again, to satisfy its voracious
consumption addiction, the North is poised to exploit the land, labor,
and biological resources of the global South. In the name of moving
"beyond petroleum" corporate power is converging to appropriate and
commodify biological resources in every part of the globe - while
leaving the root causes of climate change intact.

_____

Hope Shand is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus and the director
of the Action Group on Erosion, Technology, and Concentration (ETC Group).

For the full ETC report, go to "Commodifying Nature's Last Straw?
Extreme Genetic Engineering and the Post-Petroleum Sugar Economy" at
http://www.etcgroup.org/en/materials/publications.html?language=English&limit=15

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5583


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