Tanzania blows hot and cold over biofuels

Last year, by one estimate, the government of Mozambique received bids from foreign investors to buy a remarkable 110,000 square kilometres of land, more than an eighth of the entire country. More than a century after the last "scramble for Africa", when European imperial powers fought to colonise the continent, the global boom in biofuels is causing a stampede into one of the world's biggest areas of uncultivated terrain.

But in countries such as neighbouring Tanzania, early enthusiasm for growing biofuel crops has moderated. The global food price crisis has underlined the risks involved in signing away large tracts of fertile land for the next century.

On paper, Tanzania is perfect for producing biofuels. An oil importer, it is desperate for cheap fuel, jobs and export earnings. It has vast amounts of land suitable for agriculture – 88m hectares (880,000 sq km) at one approximation, of which only 6 per cent is currently farmed. Some is vulnerable to drought, but certain plants such as jatropha, whose seeds are used to make biodiesel, can survive with little water in relatively poor soils. And the special duty-free access to the European Union market that Tanzania enjoys as an African country gives it an edge over Brazilian ethanol exporters.

It is in villages like Mtamba, in the Coast Province of Tanzania, that such options are being weighed. Sun Biofuels, a UK-based company active in Ethiopia, is acquiring 8,000 hectares to grow jatropha, part of a plan to plant more than 40,000 hectares. But what emerges from conversations with villagers and officials is how little information filters down to them.

Peter Auge, general manager of Sun Biofuels Tanzania, says the plantation will not take land out of food production. The land is not at present being farmed, containing only a few fruit and coconut trees for which he is paying compensation. He says it will provide year-round jobs tending and harvesting the plants at $3 (€1.90, £1.50) a day, relatively good pay for the area, and 5 per cent of its budget will be spent on social infrastructure such as schools.

The village, belatedly informed of Sun Biofuels' intentions by the district authorities, decided in a hastily convened meeting in early 2006 to welcome the investment. Although they have been told there will be employment on the jatropha plantation, they do not know what work and at what pay. Only one villager has even seen jatropha before. "There has not been a lot of actual opposition, but it has been a period of uncertainties," says Hamisi Rubalati, the local government executive officer for the village. "People in the village have started being worried about the employment because they are not qualified for many jobs."

The programme will involve evicting a camp where local people, usually illicitly, make charcoal. Mapuri Magengemapya, who runs a shop at the charcoal settlement, says: "If the government takes us out, that is their decision. But they need to give me some way of sustaining a livelihood." And if a rising population wanted to turn the land to food in the future, it would have a long wait. Apart from the compensation, which Sun Biofuels says amounts to $220,000 between 152 farmers, the company is getting the land for free on a 99-year lease.

The difficulty of making such decisions is exacerbated by Tanzania's creaky government machinery and poor communications. A promised national biofuels strategy has not yet materialised. Mr Auge says acquiring the land has proved "extremely bureaucratic and long-winded". With the price of staple foods such as maize and rice in Tanzania doubling in the past year, second thoughts are setting in. In the neighbouring Rufiji province, Sekab, a Swedish company, is bidding for 50,000 hectares on the banks of a lake to grow sugarcane and build distilleries to export ethanol to Europe. Unlike jatropha, sugarcane sucks up a great deal of water and requires fertile soil.

Ali Rufunga, the Rufiji district commissioner, says: "This could divert a critical part of the labour force away from producing food and into the [ethanol] factories." Although villages retain the power to make decisions over their land, they are susceptible to pressure from the central government, which vets foreign investors. Mr Rufunga says: "We at the local level are the recipients of directives from above: you have to help this investor to get land."

Those messages are becoming mixed. William Olenasha, a land specialist with Oxfam in Tanzania, says Jakaya Kikwete, the country's president, first appeared enthusiastic about biofuels, appearing on television with a Sekab director and pledging support. "But then three weeks ago he made a speech warning about the effect of biofuels on food security," Mr Olenasha says.

Mr Auge agrees: government officials, he says, "tend to blow hot and cold depending on who they are talking to". Recently they have blown cold, the 8,000 hectare grant having been reduced from Sun Biofuels' original request for 19,000. The food versus fuel debate is exercising governments around the world. But in countries like Tanzania, it seems to be generating confusion rather than clarity.

Source: money.ninemsn.com.au

Publication date: 5/29/2008

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