Agrofuels are no solution for climate change but a business
December 9, 2008
By Hans Pienaar
Consumers in Germany believe they are helping to fight climate change by filling their tanks with biodiesel from Africa, without any awareness of how agrofuels are just another instance of big agrobusiness.
That is how Vanessa Black, of the the African Centre for Biosafety, views the rapidly evolving industry on the continent. She and other speakers at an Institute for Security Studies (ISS) seminar in Pretoria last Thursday painted a picture of the usual exploitation of Africa dressed up in the language of global warming battles.
In South Africa, too, the government "has embraced the establishment of an agrofuels industry", which has been identified as a key growth sector in the accelerated and shared growth initiative.
But, says Black, it is set to add to the failure of other development programmes based on industrialising agriculture in rural areas.
That agrofuels, although still low in volume, have set off another small scramble for Africa became apparent from the case studies presented by Abdallah Mkindi of Envirocare in Tanzania, and Edward Nyakahuma of the Climate and Development Initiative in Uganda.
More than 40 companies had shown an interest in agrofuels in Tanzania, said Mkindi.
One example is Sekab of Sweden, which already has 3 000ha under cultivation for agrofuels and plans to have between 15 000ha and 30 000ha by 2010. Its long-term aim is to put 400 000ha under sugar cane.
Prokon is using 2 000 outgrowers on 10 000ha of jatropha, which has become a kind of miracle plant in agrofuels circles. The oil it produces is used to add power to the national electricity provider grid.
Another model is that introduced by the Dutch firm Bioshape, which has 81 000ha of jatropha under cultivation in Kilwa, Tanzania.
The Dutch showed some conscience when they bought the communal land, agreeing that 60 percent of the price had to go to local councils and the rest to the members of the communities affected.
But they are not scoring greenie points by transporting the jatropha to plants in the Netherlands, where it provides jobs to Europeans, not Africans.
Various crops are cultivated, but jatropha is the best example of the risks involved and where the industry errs.
It was regarded in Tanzania as a weed, explained Mkindi. It was a wild relative of cassava, which is poisonous if not properly prepared.
If too much of it grows, it can help spread the superlongation virus, which is normally spread by cassava, but not in dangerous quantities.
Graham von Maltitz of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research also aired his doubts about jatropha, saying the new wonder plant was being cultivated without undergoing proper trials.
Jatropha was a labour intensive crop, he said, which might be viable as long as countries in Africa stayed impoverished and overpopulated. In countries such as South Africa, which had a proper minimum wage, it would never be commercially sound to produce the crop.
Another problem with agrofuels is they need a lot of water and nutrients. In southern Africa, said an audience participant, water was already developing as a conflict flashpoint, and devoting this scarce resource to agrofuels would only exacerbate the situation.
Several participants mentioned the Makhatini Flats in northern KwaZulu-Natal - the focus of a large sugar cane-based agrofuels project - where water is simply not available in sufficient quantities.
Von Maltitz said that in Mozambique, only 1 percent of its arable land was needed to replace all its fuel consumption with ethanol. But that was if its current consumption of fossil fuels stayed the same; in South Africa the figure would be 14.6 percent - more than the total arable land available.
Currently the government's target in its biofuels industrial strategy is 2 percent replacement of fossil by agrofuels by 2012 and only 6 percent by 2020 - an indication that it will not be the solution to fuel energy demands any time soon.
Trusha Reddy of the ISS said agrofuels were being punted as a panacea for climate change concerns. In Europe, it is punted as the solution to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. In Africa, governments promote it as a creator of jobs and renewable energy sources.
"But agrofuels are not about energy security in Africa, and not about food security at all," Reddy said.
|
|
