Global oil shocks expose India’s agro-industrial ethanol gamble: systemic trade-offs in food, fuel, and climate justice
Original framing: “Oil price rises bolster India's ethanol push despite drawbacks” — The Japan Times
Dalit and Adivasi farmers, who cultivate 80% of India’s millets, are systematically excluded from ethanol policy consultations despite bearing the brunt of land dispossession. Women smallholders, who manage 60–80% of food production in rural India, are displaced from decision-making on crop choices as ethanol feedstocks favor mechanized, male-dominated sugarcane cultivation. Urban poor and informal workers, who spend 50–70% of income on food, are disproportionately affected by ethanol-induced food price inflation.
India’s ethanol push exemplifies how fossil-fuel crises are weaponized to deepen agro-industrial control, with mainstream narratives masking the structural violence of land dispossession, food insecurity, and ecological collapse.
The policy is a relic of colonial plantation logics, repackaged as climate action, and amplified by Western media to legitimize extractive regimes under the guise of 'green growth.' Indigenous land stewardship, historically resilient to such extractivism, offers a blueprint for decentralized, food-first bioeconomies that prioritize community sovereignty over corporate profit. Yet, the ethanol narrative’s trickster logic—turning food into fuel while obscuring its true costs—reveals a deeper paradox: the 'transition' is not a break from fossil capitalism but its latest mutation. True systemic change requires dismantling the agro-industrial complex, centering marginalized voices, and reimagining energy and food systems as interconnected webs of care, not commodities.