By Dave Harcourt

Ashenafi Chote, of the Wolaytta district south of Addis Ababa, says that he regrets converting his land from food crops to caster seeds for biodiesel. He is now dependent on Food Aid and can no longer generate income from his land. CastorThe company that got him into this situation admit they have been unable to pay him, as agreed, because a loan they expected hasn’t come through!

The realisation that the cost of biofuel crops grown in temperate climates is too high to support a viable biodiesel industry has lead Europe to look elsewhere for cheaper raw materials. Africa, with its appropriate climate, soil fertility, and low labour costs can produce oil for biodiesel much more cheaply than Europe. Biofuels have been supported as a development path by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and other agencies of the United Nations (UN), with the proviso that projects are properly implemented to avoid any impact on food production or the environment. Unfortunately, unscrupulous companies can quite easily take advantage of desperate small farmers and naive governments, to drive unfair contracts.

As someone living in South Africa, with some experience of working in poor rural areas, the stories of wealth and benefits for small scale farmers entering the biofuels sector make little sense to me. The shear scale of the world’s biodiesel demand result in numbers which just don’t make sense. Ashenafi Chote, who opened this story normally produced 100 kg of maize, which indicates that he is farming, at most, 0.4 ha. With normal yields this would produce about 160 litres of biodiesel which would allow a medium sized MPV to travel some 2,500 km. Therefore, 10 farmers are needed to keep the MPV on the road for a year. If farmers are expected to only change a third of their land to castor, this means 3 million farmers are needed to produce just 1 % of the UKs biodiesel consumption. The logistics of it are just impossible, imagine millions of farmers wanting to deliver their crop and collect their few dollars at harvest time. So I believe all these projects are actually designed around large scale commercial production with the small farmer component used to put a “good spin” on the project.

Two posts on EcoWorldly Biofuels War: The New Scramble for Africa by Western Big Money Profiteers and Are Biofuels Another Inconvenient Truth? have given different but related views on the potential and implications of first generation biofuels. Scanning the news its clear that the publicity and optimism at the start of these projects is what everyone, especially biofuel companies and governments promote. They are slower to report the problems that often arise.

So back to Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Government has encouraged biofuel projects as a means of reducing the drain on the economy of importing increasingly expensive crude oil. As a result several Jatropha and Castor Oil projects have been established. In early June 2006 Melis Teka, coordinator of biofuel development in the Ministry of Mines and Energy, told Reuters

There is no shortage of agriculture land in Ethiopia for food production. We have up to 23 million hectares which could be developed both for crops and biofuel. Biofuel plants are being developed on arid and barren land not suitable for food production.

At the end of March 2008 the Ethiopian Review reported that Global Energy Ethiopia (GEE), who operated one of the Government supported projects, expected their first batch of 28 000 tons of castor seeds in August/September 2008. The castor, equivalent to 12 000 tons of oil, would actually be grown by 25,000 families contracted by GEE and would have a value of around US$ 10 million.

Ashenafi Chote was one of the farmers contracted by GEE. He as well as the other farmers have not been paid for their production because, as Agence France-Presse  reports, GEE has been unable to raise the loan it was expecting to use to buy the castor. Ashenafi Chote is now in a very dangerous situation as he planted all his land with castor. He now has neither the food he normally grew for his family, nor the small income he generated by selling his excess production. GEE defends itself by saying it “did not allow” farmers to plant more than a third of their land to castor. However, it was GEE’s promises that moved farmers to invest everything in castor, from which they have to date gained no benefit. GEE’s actions show little understanding of poor people and the lives they struggle to live

A final interesting point is that planting a non food crop like castor or Jatropha (both contain toxins and are inedible) benefits the biodiesel refiner as it means that there is no market competition for the farmer’s production. For the farmer it limits their options, but more importantly, the crops can’t be eaten if the refiner doesn’t deliver as is the case in the above story.

My personal concern is that this is the type of project problem that will be repeated many times before the dust settles and Africa actually benefit from this opportunity.