Even though 48 percent of Salvadorans live below the poverty line, according to the United Nations Development Program, the huge influx of remittances from migrants in the United States means that more Salvadorans are buying cars, formerly a luxury reserved only for the very rich. And El Salvador is not alone: while Americans and Europeans are buying fewer SUVs and driving less, vehicle sales in most developing countries are on the rise. Toyota’s 2006 first-quarter sales in Central America, for example, were up 9 percent from 2005.

More cars means more gasoline, and gasoline consumption in Central America increased by 10 percent between 2000 and 2003, according to the International Energy Agency. Every Central American country imports oil, so the recent price increases have been painful for these economically weak countries. Costa Rica, for example, saw an increase of 45 percent in oil costs between 2004 and 2005.

With both consumption and oil prices on the rise, leaders are looking for an alternative. Enter biofuels.

The fuss over Brazil’s biofuels bonanza has not gone unnoticed by many of its Latin American and Caribbean neighbors, who, like the mammoth South American country, have been producing sugarcane for centuries. With an annual output of 4.8 billion gallons, Brazil has worked the energy world into a tizzy over the possibility that petroleum-based gasoline may have a viable competitor — or at least partner — in the form of ethanol. It’s an opportunity that has many environmentalists cheering, corn and sugar growers salivating, and oil companies scratching their heads to figure out how to get in on the action.

And it seems that Central America may offer some of the best prospects for biofuel production: a Brazilian government study recently identified the area as a good candidate for reproducing Brazil’s ethanol experiment.

Latin America’s potential has also not escaped notice in the international community. In June, when former U.S. President Bill Clinton met with Inter-American Development Bank President Luis Alberto Moreno, Clinton made the case for Latin America “lead[ing] the world” in biofuels. An alternative-energy strategy in the region, he said, could create jobs, protect the environment, and sharpen Latin America’s competitive edge in the global economy.

Before oil prices surged, most sugar-producing countries saw little reason to invest in ethanol. But oil is up, and sugar is too — prices for the sweet stuff have doubled since early 2005. That’s left many warming to the notion that it may be more profitable to produce sugar for ethanol production than for consumption as a foodstuff. Economically and environmentally, biofuels seem to make good sense.

What’s Happening Now

Several countries in South and Central America have either initiated or are planning national biofuel programs of some kind, including Argentina, Costa Rica, Colombia, El Salvador, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela.

Now that’s where I’m talking about.

Photo: iStockphoto

It’s not just ethanol that’s attracting attention. These countries are also looking at new ways of producing biodiesel with native and oil-rich plants like Jatropha curcus, a tree native to the American tropics whose nut can produce about 200 gallons of oil per acre, and African palm, a tree rich with oil.

So who’s venturing into the biofuels arena at full speed? Here’s a look.

Honduras, among the poorest nations in Central America, is seeing dollar signs in sugar, a product that until recently has not held much promise. “We need to reduce our dependence on oil by promoting the production of ethanol and biodiesel,” President Manuel Zelaya said earlier this year. “In addition to fuel, what we can generate is a number of important jobs growing sugarcane.”

The government has encouraged sugar production with subsidies, and farmers have responded by planting 27,200 acres of new sugarcane to supply two ethanol refineries. Zelaya’s agricultural ministry is also looking to enter the biodiesel market, and is using abandoned farmland to plant 494,000 acres of African palm.

In March, El Salvador opened Central America’s first biodiesel plant with financial support from Finland to produce 400 liters a day. The project is part of a public-private partnership between Finland’s Environment and Foreign Affairs Ministries and 34 Central American companies and institutions to cultivate renewable energies and combat climate change. They are feeding the plant with seeds from the Higuerillo tree and the fruits of the Jatropha bush, both native plants.

“Agriculture and biofuels have a future here because we have the ideal climate, good quality land, and six months of rain a year,” said Mario Ernesto Salaverría, El Salvador’s minister of agriculture and livestock. “We also have a lot of available land: only 70 percent of the country’s arable land is currently in use.”

Guatemala already has a Brazilian-designed ethanol plant, though it is not producing car-ready ethanol because local demand is not yet high enough. But experts at the IDB say the country’s ethanol producers will soon be able to sell it internationally. Farmers in Guatemala are also planting Jatropha like their neighbors in Mexico and El Salvador; 300,000 plants are already in the ground courtesy of a private investment by Guatemalan business leader Ricardo Asturias.

Costa Rica, a country well known for its environmental and conservation prowess, has set a target of substituting 7 percent of its gasoline with ethanol by the end of 2008. In early 2006, Costa Rica’s state-run national gasoline refinery RECOPE began a pilot project with Brazilian oil company Petrobras to introduce 7.5 percent ethanol into gasoline at 63 gas stations. But while ethanol is available at virtually every gas station in Brazil, Central American countries may face far more resistance in building consumer confidence in the product: According to IDB, the Costa Rican government hopes to expand the $15 million program across the nation, but ran up against consumer suspicions that the ethanol would ruin car engines.

It’s the Neighborly Thing to Do

Brazil’s partnership with Central American biofuel producers may look like a helping hand, but it’s motivated by bigger-picture interests. Brazilian ethanol producers, who have to pay a 54-cent tariff to export to the United States, have invested in facilities in El Salvador and Jamaica that get duty-free access to the U.S. through the Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act, a trade agreement initiated in 1983 designed to promote export-oriented growth in the Caribbean Basin countries. Guatemala, Panama, and the Dominican Republic are also said to be collaborating with the Brazilians to build new distilleries.

Congresspeople get their knickers
in a twist over CAFTA.

Photo: house.gov

The Central America Free Trade Agreement, passed last year by the U.S. Congress and signed by nearly every Central American country, provides other incentives for ramping up biofuels. “The support for sugarcane in CAFTA will help us to expand our alternative-fuel program,” said Ricardo Esmahan d’Aubuisson, president of the Agricultural and Agroindustrial Council of El Salvador.

That has pushed members of the nascent U.S. ethanol industry to complain, saying it hurts those trying to produce ethanol from corn. “By enabling ethanol imports into the U.S., CAFTA undercuts decades of work by farmers, rural communities, and millions of dollars in taxpayers’ investments in federal and state government programs to build this U.S. ethanol industry,” says a report by the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

Central America’s biofuel operators will also have to face up to some environmental critics who wonder what they will do with the vinasse, the high-potassium byproduct of ethanol production from sugarcane. In Brazil they are reusing vinasse as a fertilizer, and IDB hopes Central America can do the same; the agency is beginning a study on the topic.

Other environmentalists have called biodiesel “deforestation diesel” because of a perception that producers are deforesting precious forests to plant oil palms. “There is no limit on [available farmland] in Central America, so I don’t think they’ll have to convert cropland or cut down trees,” said Arnaldo Vieira de Carvalho, a sustainable-energy expert at the IDB. “But we do need to study and plan for these things so that we avoid those kind of impacts. So far it’s not happening in Brazil, so I think it can be avoided elsewhere in the region.”

And still others say biofuels are too energy-intensive to produce and will drive up the cost of foodstuffs the poor barely have access to now. Earth Policy Institute founder Lester Brown, writing in Fortune in August, said, “For the world’s poorest people, many of whom spend half or more of their income on food, rising grain prices can quickly become life threatening.”

Ultimately, experts say, the large-scale development of biofuels in Central America will depend on an influx of private investment and strong political will. And the region should not expect to be able to replicate Brazil’s success.

“Sugarcane production for ethanol is much more oriented toward the large scale, which Brazil has done,” said Suzanne Hunt, biofuels program manager at the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, D.C. “But biodiesel is better suited to the small scale, and Central American governments could focus on biodiesel production.”

Before its potential is tapped, Central America will remain in the position it’s in now: a great unknown between two major biofuels players, Brazil and the U.S. Whether it will be a linchpin or a loser, no one knows.

A U.S. Border Patrol truck on the
move near Douglas, Ariz.

Photo: Congressional Immigration Reform
Caucus.

If you ask the Border Patrol, they will tell you they apprehended nearly 1.2 million illegal crossers in fiscal year 2005, and that it was an increase from the previous year. They won’t mention that roughly double that number managed to elude them over the last five years.

Meanwhile, Enrique Enriquez of Grupo Beta, a Mexican group that helps migrants in part by rescuing those abandoned by smugglers in the Arizona desert, will say that the number of deaths in the desert rises every year, with the harsh climate tragically trumping even the best efforts to survive.

Others see the land — especially the sensitive ecosystems of the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona, where the majority of illegal immigrants have been crossing since the mid-1990s — as another loser in the ongoing battle between immigrants, drug traffickers, and the authorities chasing them.

This month, as the House and Senate gear up for the challenging (some say impossible) task of reconciling their competing immigration-reform bills, many on the front lines are anxious to see major policy shifts that attack the root of the problem, steering people out of the desert and through legal points of entry. For their part, conservationists say the environmental impacts of illegal immigration — like the human ones — are too serious to continue unchecked.

When It Terrains, It Pours

“The sheer number of immigrants and Border Patrol agents pursuing them is having a huge impact on natural resources in the borderlands,” says Sally Gall, a refuge operations specialist with U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge near Sasabe, Ariz. Gall and her coworkers face an increasingly difficult mission: trying to take care of 118,000 acres crossed by an estimated 2,000 to 4,000 migrants daily between February and May, when temperatures begin to creep into the triple digits.

Buenos Aires is one of three swaths of protected public lands along the Arizona border, and abuts Mexico for five flat, sparsely populated miles — making it an ideal place to slip across. Besides topography, there’s another reason the spot is popular, says David Bemiller, the Border Patrol Tucson Sector’s public-lands liaison: the patrol is generally stretched thin across the sector’s high-migrant-traffic zone.

While the Border Patrol is in principle required to follow federal laws like the Wilderness Act, which prohibits taking vehicles off-road in wilderness areas, the agency’s law-enforcement prerogative frequently leads officers into remote terrain in pursuit of traffickers.

“The smuggling organizations are very aware of where the protected lands are,” Bemiller says. “They’re aware of where the [Border Patrol's] restrictions are, and tend to take advantage of them. They exploit the wilderness areas.”

Belongings left behind in the
Buenos Aires refuge.

Photo: Eliza Barclay.

The resulting cat-and-mouse conflicts can cause staggering impacts on the land. According to Gall, an estimated 500 tons of trash are generated on the refuge per year, almost entirely by migrants. (While the refuge is open to visitors for camping and hunting, tourism has significantly declined in the last few years, according to refuge law enforcement, in part because of safety concerns.) Recently, one “staging area” — a spot where migrants are forced to shed most of their belongings before cramming into the vehicle sent to pick them up — was covered by approximately 100 square yards of clothing, backpacks, water bottles, deodorant, and other detritus.

Gall says erosion from the huge number of trails generated by crossings is also worrisome. “We estimate there are about 1,500 linear miles of foot trails,” she says. “Over time, the areas with trails have become devoid of vegetation, and we will see increased erosion, gullying, and trenching as the water runs down the trails during the monsoon season [in July and August].”

Further damage is caused by vehicle chases. “We’ve asked the Border Patrol to try to stick to the roads, but when they’re in pursuit they often go off them,” Gall says, and others confirm that’s also the case in similar protected areas.

Bemiller says the agency has recently made a concerted effort to respect the sensitive environments where migrants often cross. “Our patrol efforts in the wilderness areas are challenging,” he acknowledges. “There are times when environmental laws and concerns are amendable to our operations, and times when they’re not.”

These worries aren’t particular to the U.S. Oscar Moctezuma of Naturalia, a leading Mexican organization that co-manages a private conservation ranch in Sonora, Mexico, with The Nature Conservancy, says migrants and the Mexican Army traverse the ranch daily. “They cross through and contaminate the water sources with their [bodily] waste,” he says. He adds that soldiers sometimes cut fences and shoot deer while looking for traffickers.

Most involved agree that natural-resource problems will never be solved until a larger policy solution is found. “Why are we fighting the Border Patrol?” asks Jenny Neeley, southwest representative for Defenders of Wildlife. “There is no solution on the ground for all the damage to these habitats and sensitive areas. We need … to give migrants an incentive to cross legally.”

Don’t Fence Me Out

If Congress succeeds in hammering out a compromise immigration-reform bill, it could provide that incentive. But it could also take the environmental impacts of U.S. national-security policy to a new and dangerous level.

Fenced section of border in Douglas, Ariz.

Photo: Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus.

The version approved by the Senate last month includes an amendment to build 370 miles of fencing and 500 miles of vehicle barriers along the border. These structures and the stadium-style lighting likely to accompany them could be constructed along remote stretches of the Sonoran Desert and other areas in Texas, New Mexico, and California that serve as corridors for wildlife.

“It’s remarkable that this amendment to build 370 miles of wall sailed through the [U.S. Senate] unopposed by the environmental community,” says Stephen Mumme, professor of political science at Colorado State University and an expert on border environmental policy. “This fence will be one of the greatest impacts on the borderlands environment in the last century.”

If the fence provision becomes law, there’s less wiggle room than one might think to challenge it and other incursions. That’s because the Department of Homeland Security — which houses the Border Patrol — gained the authority in 2005 to waive any U.S. law when border security is at stake.

The agency first invoked the waiver in September 2005, when the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society of San Diego challenged construction of the final segment of a 14-mile fence slated to bulwark the Tijuana Estuary. A district court threw out the case, but according to environmental lawyer Cory Briggs, the groups are filing a new suit claiming that the waiver itself is unconstitutional.

Environmental groups working in Arizona have considered suing the Border Patrol for its off-road operations on public protected lands, says Neeley, but are afraid the waiver will be invoked, further paralyzing environmental legal strategies. “No one is litigating here, because there’s very little recourse if the waiver is invoked,” says Neeley. “Congress would have to enact a new law getting rid of the waiver” to pave the way for a successful suit against DHS, she says.

While environmentalists are alarmed by DHS’s ability to ignore federal laws when convenient, Bemiller contends that environmental laws can hinder the Border Patrol’s objectives. “We are installing rescue beacons [30-foot towers where people in distress can call for help] in the zones with the highest number of deaths, but it’s a two-year process to install each one because of the National Environmental Policy Act,” he says. He adds that NEPA requires the agency to analyze the impacts on endangered species like the Pima pineapple cactus. “Meanwhile, there are people dying in the desert, and we get blamed for it.”

The Rev. Robin Hoover of Humane Borders, a humanitarian group that provides water and first aid for desert-crossing immigrants, is skeptical of Bemiller’s complaint. “[DHS] could get permission to install those beacons in a heartbeat if they wanted them that bad,” says Hoover, claiming that the agency has the ability to move swiftly on high-priority issues.

While the bickering continues between the Border Patrol, humanitarian groups, and environmental groups on the ground in the borderlands, Mumme argues that environmentalists should be trying to get their voices into the high-profile national debate over immigration policy now playing out in Washington.

“The only way to fight this is to insist on being at the table on all homeland-security matters,” Mumme says. “Border security is environmental security, and the consequences, trade-offs, and costs … need to be included in the debate.”