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Abstract
Biofuels are seen as a partial replacement for fossil fuels which can also provide a tool for greenhouse gas mitigation. Their incorporation in the liquid fuel portfolio of many advanced economies is creating demand and consequently increased production. Increased quantities may well endanger the sustainability aspect of production. The way biofuels are produced from the point of view of feedstock and location may have negative impacts on biodiversity and may endanger food security. Nevertheless there is an important contribution of biofuel production to the development of rural communities in developing countries. For internal consumption it can have substantial economic benefits in terms of energy self sufficiency but may also add an important developmental impetus for those regions that can export the commodity to the international market.
Motives for promoting biofuels differ according to region and economy. Biofuels can be conceptualised primarily as energy and produced for the purposes of energy security or energy self-sufficiency. They can also be conceived and promoted as agriculture, strictly for the purposes of sustaining a rural system of production. Their production could be motivated by environmental sensibility in accordance with climate change mitigation. The basic pattern in the global biofuel production and trade today is an insistence from the part of the developed world to safeguard and increase domestic production through mandates, subsidies and tariffs while the more abundant and sustainable option of increased production from the developing world is stymied. Sustainability and development involves a reconsideration of this basic pattern and a reversal of roles in order to attain a picture where the developed world imports sustainably produced biofuels from the developing world who are able to reap the benefits of increased production. This basic scheme needs to be checked in a multitude of levels for a plethora of different variables.
This thesis explains the intricacies of a production process that has impacts on a broad spectrum of environmental conditions, on food security and on rural development. It examines all aspects of international production with the aim of recommending a regime of governance that will safeguard sustainability. The aim is not to recommend actions and measures to be taken but to specify the polity, the governance system, the institutional regime that will bring countries together for undertaking measures and actions. Even if the dominant motivation for biofuel production is not environmental sensitivity, the cumulative and potential environmental impacts including those of food security are the most contentious ones. The discussion of biofuels is placed firmly within the context of environmental regime theory and compared and contrasted with multilateral environmental agreements. What provides the ground and the architectural model for the recommended regime is the discussion of international environmental law, especially concerning organizations, autonomous bodies, secretariats and conferences both in its theory and practice. The recommendation is very pragmatic, given the amount of activity by all possible stakeholders with regard to biofuel production and the intricacy of the system elaborated in the beginning. The recommendation places the issue within an organization that has ample mandate, authority, relevance and experience within the field as well as the most apposite role to enhance the developmental facet of sustainable biofuel production.