Co-operative Research on Environmental Problems in Europe http://www.tni.org/report/agrofuel-crops

Rural development: In all the cases, agrofuels have been promoted in the global South as an opportunity for rural development, giving special emphasis to inclusion of small-scale producers. But in practice, the latter’s role has remained marginal; instead agro-business interests have prevailed. Land availability assumptions, such as the existence of ´marginal’ or ‘degraded’ land, provides a basis for plantations to expand there – supposedly without harming the environment or food production.

Treating land as ‘marginal’ can justify its agri-industrial appropriation for agrofuels but may provoke protest from local people being dispossessed. In Brazil agri-industrial plantations create ‘employment’ but degrade its conditions and readily undermine other livelihoods in the informal economy. Promoting such agri-industrial development creates conflicts with Brazil’s environmental protection law, which has undergone pressure to be softened, thus contradicting EC policy assumptions about national regulatory regimes.