Green gold losing its glitter to be?

Some 5,000 farmers are involved, he says, with a total of 3,500 hectares of jatropha planted between them.

“The idea is to grow to 10,000 by the end of this year,” he says.

In other countries, jatropha has yet to capture the local support.

In the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, farmers have been bombarded with seeds and promotional material from companies but received little to no support, says Jakob Rietzler of the Lao Institute for Renewable Energy in Vientiane.

As a result, he says, the jatropha they planted reached harvest at the same time as the rice crops.

“Farmers neglect their jatropha seeds because they have to harvest their rice,” he says.

In India, where much of the jatropha hype originated, success will come only if a conservative, realistic approach is adopted at the beginning, says Pushpito Ghosh, director of the Central Salt and Marine Chemicals Research Institute in Bhavnagar.

He sees the hype and subsequent disappointment surrounding jatropha as a weeding-out process, leaving behind smaller, more professional players like the Australia-based Jatoil and China, one of the world’s leading biofuel manufacturers, which is also taking an interest in jatropha, with 105,000 hectares planted in the country by 2008 and a total of 700,000 predicted by 2015.

SciDev.Net