Article: How a 'Miracle' Biofuel Plant Ruined Kenyan Farmers

[ghosthunter]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/2009100...08599192753800

[SIZE="4"]How a 'Miracle' Biofuel Plant Ruined Kenyan Farmers[/SIZE]
Time.com
By NICK WADHAMS / KIBWEZI Nick Wadhams / Kibwezi – 29 mins ago

Everyone in Kibwezi, a village in southeastern Kenya parched by four years of drought, remembers the promises. It all started in 2000, when the government started preaching the word about a plant called jatropha curcas. That surprised people in Kibwezi because everyone already knew about Jatropha - it's a weed. Sometimes people planted it to fence off their farms, but usually they just ignored it.

The government told the farmers, however, that jatropha seeds can be pressed to make biofuel and that scientists believed the plant's seeds contained more oil than other biofuel crops. Even better, the government said, jatropha needed little tending. All you had to do was stick it in the ground and watch it grow. Best of all for Kibwezi, a place that's frequently stricken by drought, scientists believed that the plant thrived on arid land. Convinced they could reap large profits from the plant in the global craze for alternative energy sources, hundreds of farmers turned over acres of their small farms to jatropha. But it didn't take them long to realize what scientists have come to realize in recent months: what was once touted as a miracle plant that needed almost no water has turned out to be anything but that. (See pictures of a global food crisis.)

Peter Munyao, a village elder, is one of the farmers who experimented with the new crop. He planted jatropha in 2006 and encouraged other farmers to follow his lead. But today, the plants on his farm have all dried up and lost their seeds and leaves. "The people who did the promotion for jatropha had not done [their] research ... because we have realized that the crop is getting moisture stress just like any other crop," he says. A study published in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a Washington-based scientific journal, found that jatropha actually requires more water per liter of biofuel produced than most other biofuel plants. That's bad news in Kenya, a country in the middle of a full-blown food crisis due to the lengthy drought. The World Food Program said in August that 3.8 million Kenyans had been affected by the drought and that malnutrition was on the rise.

Kenya isn't the only country that's gotten caught up in the excitement over jatropha. Last December, an Air New Zealand jet powered by a jatropha/kerosene blend made a successful test flight. China, Brazil and even Myanmar have promoted it heavily, sometimes forcing farmers to plant it. In India, jatropha has been planted on hundreds of thousands of acres of land. But, like the farmers in Kibwezi, farmers in these other countries have also experienced problems growing the plant. In India, for example, a test project at several agricultural colleges produced seed yields of only 200 grams per plant - a fifth the expected output of one kilogram of seeds per plant. (Read: "Biofuel Gone Bad: Burma's Atrophying Jatropha.")

David Newman, who runs the Nairobi-based biofuels consultancy Endelevu Energy, says there have been isolated examples of success growing jatropha. "Occasionally a tree has survived in a marginal area and produces quite a bit of seed with no [agricultural] inputs whatsoever. But there's a difference between that one tree and replicating it thousands of times in the field," he says. The problem with jatropha, scientists say, is that there is no proven, widely disseminated method for growing it properly.

In the absence of reliable information, the farmers in Kenya were fed mistruths about the plant and its biofuel potential by nongovernmental organizations and the government, which got much of their information from the Internet. The farmers said they were persuaded to buy so-called "certified" jatropha seeds, which were said to grow in tough conditions. They were also told they would be given advice on how to plant their fields and that once the plants began to produce seeds, agricultural officials would buy them at prices upwards of 1,000 shillings ($13) per kilogram. Farmers were also told that demand would increase steadily for the oil produced by the seeds. (See pictures of oil.)

The problem is, none of those promises came to be. "It was a combination of international hype and local organizations who were ... selling seeds at very high prices claiming that they were special certified seeds when really they were just seeds collected from old trees in the wild," Newman says. The plants also did not do well in arid conditions. "[The plant] was more fragile, especially in its initial establishment phase, than we thought," says Jan Van den Abeele, executive director for Better Globe Forestry, a Nairobi-based group that studies optimal conditions for planting trees in dry areas. And many farmers had no buyers for their seeds. Some began giving them away to neighbors.

Farmers in Kibwezi quickly realized that they would have to throw out the rulebook to make their crops grow. Boniface Muoki's jatropha plants look like they're doing well - they're covered with thick green leaves and fruit. But Muoki says he did almost nothing the government experts told him to Do - instead, he planted the seedlings in meter-deep holes so that they would collect more rainwater and he tends the plants fastidiously. "It's the farmer who knows best," Muoki says. "At this point, I know more about jatropha than most anyone because it's me who experienced jatropha every day, who has seen how the plant behaves in varied conditions." (Read: "Can Airplanes Fly on Biofuel?")

The problems haven't discouraged other jatropha proponents, either. For several years, Titus Kisavi traveled the region encouraging farmers to grow the plant, earning a commission from development groups for the seeds he sold. These days, however, he doesn't have a job and he spends his afternoons at a bar near Kibwezi. Still, he hasn't given up on the plant. "I have a very big passion for jatropha," Kisavi said. "I visit farmers and tell them to plant it in the hope that one day ... somebody will come to the farms and sign contracts for the seed. We know one day that jatropha will be in very high demand."

[ghosthunter]

[SIZE="3"]This should be a warning to those who are championing the "jatropha" plant as the miracle biofuel plant for the Philippines bio-fuel movement.[/SIZE]

[bugsyboy]

How much was it that the Philippine Government through the Department of Energy spent for the propagation and planting of jatropha curcus? If I'm not mistaken the amount spent costs over P500 million pesos of public money. That is over and above other funds diverted to the propagation and plating of jatropha or "tuba-tuba". Tuba-tuba the local name of jatropha is considered a weed. Even ruminants (cattle, carabaos, goats) won't graze on them. It is toxic to humans and animals alike. Its oil has very little use much more for food. They should have spent the funds to develop the coconut industry and planter more coconut along the coastal areas. Coconuts are food, nutraceuticals, and an excellent source of coconut methyl ester (CME) as biofdiesel. The Philippine Government has been fooling the people about jatropha.

[4wrider]

This is one time, I think, we can benefit from our government. With the cryptic bureacratic red tape, political foot dragging and the generally anti-business practices of local officials none of the major jatropha projects have materialized as yet. And with new like this, the leftist will now have another issue to keep foreign investments away.

[ghosthunter]

This is one time, I think, we can benefit from our government. With the cryptic bureacratic red tape, political foot dragging and the generally anti-business practices of local officials none of the major jatropha projects have materialized as yet. And with new like this, the leftist will now have another issue to keep foreign investments away.

So what are we going to do with the bio-fuels requirement that the Jatropha oil was supposedly meant to be used for?

[badkuk]

there was a news article, last month ata, about a company closing down its jatropha venture...seems the jatropha isn't as hardy a plant as some people would like to believe. It *will survive* in arid land, but i guess it doesn't produce as much seeds to make ethanol production feasible.

imho, medyo watak watak ung biofuels initiative sa atin: merong nagtatanim ng jatropha, ung iba sugarcane, ung iba coconut...and recently i also came across an article about another plant that's supposed to have a higher yield than jatropha. i guess it's some sort of process of elimination to figure out what will work here, pero if you're a small time farmer, you'd only need to bet on the wrong plant once to go bankrupt.

[4wrider]

Biofuel is more of a political requirement than an economic need. It is an alternative mean espoused by the rich countries to reduce world dependence from politically unstable and unfriendly suppliers of oil. Of course, the environmentalist would also add that its use as biofuel will also help against global warming.

However, if the article you pasted is true then jathropa might not be an ideal crop in RP since it would require well watered arable land and manpower to propagate it. These would take away precious land and labor for food crops. Also, the fact that jathropa is not native to the Philippines, its disruptive/destructive potential effect on the ecosystem is still unknown - there are also reports that some have died after ingesting jathropa's seed.

I suggest then, that if we really need biofuel then we should instead study the extraction of fuel from biomass produced from our already existing crops using low-cost indigenous alternative technology.

[SRAJAGOPAL8]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/2009100...08599192753800

We at Labland biotechs(Estd 1994),are doing a research on this plant from 2001 and are maintaining our own plantations of 300 acres.We are located in Mysore India.We are running our vehicles with Jatropha based biodiesel,produced in our campus.

Somebody need to plant,somebody need to maintain the plantation,somebody to buy the seeds.We have been buying the seeds regularly from our growers for the past few years.This is the situation in India.

Raj
www.lablandbiotechs.com

[ghosthunter]

MOD's Note: if anyone is wondering, the post by SRAJAGOPAL8 is legit from India.

[badkuk]

sorghum pala pwede ding pang ethanol. imho it's a bit more flexible than jatropha -- ginagamit ata siya for beer brewing, etc. -- and it's not as susceptible to commodity price shifts like sugar. Though i don't think pwede siyang gawing harina or food.