Paper short abstract:

Pushed by a global demand, biofuel policies in S.A rest heavily on an intensive and extensive use of land leading to enormous socio-environmental impacts. From a regional perspective the article analysis the interaction between politics, science and private interest towards sustainable policies.

Paper long abstract:

The natural resource curse thesis coined by Auty (1993) remains up to date as the development strategies of most countries in the Global South continue to be directly tied to an intensive exploitation of natural resources. This is particularly evident within the biofuels sector where a growing external demand for this good, coming from industrialized economies, has led South American countries to become global biofuels providers (Fulquet, 2012) even when the socio-economic sustainability of this development model is still at stake (Pengue, 2009; Wilkinson & Herrera, 2011).

Ccooperative interactions between prominent biofuel producing countries such as Argentina, Brazil - and even Paraguay- are framed under relaunched (MERCOSUR) and new (UNASUR) regional organizations that reflect a concert of like-minded governments that composed the so called "new Latin American left" (Vilas, 2005; Laclau, 2006). While an array of uncertainties monopolize the global debates around the sustainability of biofuels, policymakers in the region are turning to expert knowledge - coming from the scientific-technical community and private actors in the sector- to overcome this limitation. Nonetheless, the contributions by experts for the development of sustainable biofuels in S.A appears to be functional to specific sectoral biased objectives (i.e safeguarding external markets) rather than to solving a collective socio-environmental problem.

This article explores the relationship between politics, science and private interests in the main biofuel producing countries in an effort to determine whether governments in the region are being able to advance the necessary mechanisms to guarantee a sustainable development strategy for the sector.