Serious consequences for Africa of biofuel production

A mainly critical attitude was the common denominator for most of the speakers at a recent workshop at the Nordic Africa Institute on governance challenges when African land is outsourced for biofuel production. The workshop covered the consequences for African land in the face of rising demands for food and energy, and the implications for smallholders.

NAI Senior Researcher Kjell Havnevik in his opening presentation noted the concern about the scale and impacts of outsourcing process for African smallholders. With 80 percent of global land reserves in Africa and Latin America there is major interest from biofuel concerns in establishing themselves on the two continents. In Africa the DRC, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mali, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania and Zambia are major targets for land outsourcing, but there is difficulty in obtaining reliable information.

The outsourcing involves environmental issues, including competition for scarce water reserves and the consequences of monocropping. There are also serious food security issues, with about one billion people affected by hunger in 2009, 265 million of these in Africa. Making land available for food export and biofuel is a very sensitive issue where civil society organizations are very active. Havnevik noted that many African countries opening for external investments in biofuel and food for export are also food importing countries.

Asbjørn Eide, Senior fellow and former Director of the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights mentioned the alleged benefits of biofuel: reducing global warming, improving incomes for the rural poor in developing countries, delaying or solving the energy crisis by providing a renewable source of energy, but ultimately disproved all points.

Eide’s “reality check” of the alleged benefits however concluded that biofuel does not reduce greenhouse gas emissions except under limited conditions and (apart from Brasilian ethanol) are more likely to increase emissions, does not on the average provide a net benefit for rural poor, meets strong local opposition and does not contribute substantially to mitigate the pending energy crisis. Eide’s overall assessment was to ask whether the cure was worse than the disease.

More information on the workshop:

Festus Boamah
Asbjörn Eide
Melinda Fones-Sundell
Kjell Havnevik
Rajabu Hamisi
Peter Roberntz, WWF