Maputo — The Mozambican government's Agriculture Promotion Centre (CEPAGRI) says that 710 million US dollars are being invested in the production of ethanol from sugar cane.

These investments come from just two companies. Procana, owned by the London-based Bioenergy Africa, has been granted 30,000 hectares in Gaza province to grow sugar for ethanol, while last year the government approved an 18,000 hectare concession in Manica province to Principle Energy (which also has its headquarters in London), for the same purpose.

The forecast production from these two undertakings is 440 million litres of ethanol a year. CEPAGRI estimates that they could create between 7,000 and 10,000 jobs.

In addition to these approved projects, the government has received a series of other proposals to produce ethanol, not only from sugar cane, but also from millet, in no less than six provinces.

CEPAGRI said that between them the projects would, if approved, put between 80,000 and 130,000 hectares of land under sugar cane cultivation by 2020, with a production of between 835 million and 1.6 billion litres of ethanol.

Most of this ethanol would be exported to the European Union. In 2007 the European commission put forward a target for the EU to boost its use of biofuels in transport to 10 per cent by 2020, and for an overall expansion of renewable energies (including biofuels) to 20 per cent by the same date.

The four existing Mozambican sugar plantation are set to produce over 419,000 tonnes of sugar this year, an increase of 68 per cent when compared with last year, when the sector produced 250,191 tonnes. This results from a 37 per cent increase in the area under cultivation, and what the sugar companies claim is a 21 per cent increase in productivity.