Daniel Nonor
3 November 2009
The challenges of the global energy crisis are pushing most African countries to look to biofuels as a solution.
Ghana, Nigeria, Angola, Kenya, South Africa and now Ethiopia together with some other African countries are all looking to alternative energy sources in response to growing energy needs and costs. Ethiopia, the Reuters news service has reported wants to produce biofuels to cut its oil import costs.
According to the report, quoting Ephrem Hassen, Coordinator of biofuels development in the Ministry of Mines and Energy, Ethiopia wants to emulate Brazil by developing biofuels to cut dependence on oil imports that costs the country more than one billion dollars a year.
Ethiopia is developing biofuel crops on more than half a million hectares of arid land.
Hassen told Reuters that "Castor oil plants, Jatropha and palm oil plants are being developed over 500,000 hectares of arid and barren lands in different parts of the country so as to reduce land-locked Ethiopia's dependency on imported oil."
The report indicated that Ethiopia has also earmarked some 1.6 million hectares of fertile land for foreign investors willing to develop modern farms with a view to making the country food self-sufficient and for boosting agricultural exports. Ephrem said investors were developing biofuels on tens of thousands of hectares of land in the western regions of Gambella and Benishangule and in the Tigray and Amhara regions.
Meanwhile, the debate over the sustainability of the use of food and non-food crops for the production of biofuels has not yet been settled. Some scientists like T. R. Sinclair writing in the American Scientist, has warned that countries that are rushing into cultivating biofuels in their efforts to reduce dependence on fossil fuels must take into consideration the multiple limits to plant production on earth.
In Professor Sinclair's view there are no means by which humans could bypass the limits of crop production, arguing that "such advances may not be as simple as some predict.
Plants and their evolutionary ancestors had hundreds of millions of years to optimize their biological machinery. If further improvements were easy, they would probably already exist."
A recent UN report calls for careful approaches to the cultivation of crops for biofuel. The report calls on governments to fit biofuels into an overall energy, climate, land-use, water and agricultural strategy if their deployment is to benefit society, the economy and the environment as a whole.
Ghana however has had the country's first commercial production of biodiesel from the non-food crop Jatropha. Biofuel Africa, a Norwegian company operating in Ghana produced 10 tons of biodiesel approximately 50 barrels from its 650 hectare plantations in both northern and southern Ghana. Africa's history of drought hunger and land related conflicts should make any decision to cultivate non-food crops on the continent for biofuels a complicated one.
Already the UN warns that one billion people in the world are at the risk of hunger and out of the 30 nations of the world that are faced with hunger, 20 are in Africa. In the light of this which way is best for Africa? Plant crops for food or biodiesel?
Even though the argument is being made that the non-food crops, especially, Jatropha could grow on 'marginal' land, one school of thought says "if you plant any crop on marginal land, you will get marginal yield." This argument therefore, raises more questions about the claim of planting on unproductive agriculture land.
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