ABSTRACT
The “food versus fuel” debate and a series of environmental controversies have undermined the claims that bioenergy crops produced on prime agricultural land are a sustainable option for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and enhancing energy security. In response, it has been proposed that their production on marginal land could circumvent these ethical issues, as this is land of lower quality and could reduce the amount of food displaced by bioenergy crop production. Despite these expected benefits, there have been major concerns about the underlying discourse of “marginal land use” and its practical implementation. This chapter uses a political ecology lens to explore the origins and critical aspects of the marginal land discourse, as it relates to bioenergy crops, and more widely to industrial crops. At the discursive level “marginal land” is an ambiguous term, with some scholars claiming that this ambiguity can be exploited to justify the controversial production of bioenergy crops. The current methods for characterising marginal land, and assessing its extent, may ignore the actual uses of land. Because land has cultural, economic, and environmental value it has been questioned if (and under what circumstances) land can be characterised as “marginal”. The accumulated experience with the use of “marginal land” for bioenergy crop production in the global South demonstrates that this “supposedly marginal land” often provides local communities with invaluable resources and ecosystem services. Such local communities may not have official property rights or the political power to prove and defend their right to this land. If bioenergy crops (and industrial crops more broadly) are to be promoted on non-prime agricultural land, then it is important to take into account the power structures, existing land uses, and local priorities for this land.
