Biofuels and the scramble for farmland in Africa

Many are keen to vaunt the social and environmental benefits of their business, offering employment and the promise of development to rural areas.

But FoE says there is also a growing awareness of the downsides of this agrofuel boom. As scientists and international institutions challenge the climate benefits of this alternative fuel source, local communities and in some cases national governments are waking up to the impact of land grabs on the environment and on local livelihoods.

In Tanzania, Madagascar and Ghana, there have already been protests following land grabs by foreign companies.

Companies have been accused of providing misleading information to local farmers, of obtaining land from fraudulent community landowners and of bypassing environmental protection laws.

Agrofuels are competing with food crops for farmland, and agrofuel development companies are competing with farmers for access to that land.

And this appears to be as much the case for jatropha, as for other crops, despite the claim that it grows on non-agricultural land.

The result however is that because of losing their access to traditional land, local communities face growing food insecurity and hunger — “their human right to food is threatened,” the report says.

Pressure on farmland has led to forests being cleared to make way for agrofuel plantations, destroying valuable natural resources and increasing greenhouse gas emissions. In Ethiopia, land inside an elephant sanctuary was cleared to make way for agrofuels.

Farmers have found that the much vaunted wonder crop jatropha, rather than bringing a guaranteed income, in fact takes valuable water resources and needs expensive pesticides.

In some cases, food crops have been cleared to plant jatropha, leaving farmers with no income and no source of food.

But the Guardian quoted Sun Biofuels, a UK company named by Friends of the Earth, as saying the reports findings were “emotional and anecdotal.”

Chief executive Richard Morgan said that biofuel production offered “an opportunity to get investment into local communities in an ethical way.”

The FoE report however disagrees, saying that this is an issue which is likely to become fiercely political over the coming decade.

“While (African) politicians promise that agrofuels will bring locally sourced energy supplies to their countries, the reality is that most of the foreign companies are developing agrofuels to sell on the international market,” the report concludes.

“Just as African economies have seen fossil fuels and other natural resources exploited for the benefit of other countries, there is a risk that agrofuels will be exported abroad with minimal benefit for local communities and national economies. Countries will be left with depleted soils, rivers that have been drained and forests that have been destroyed.”