news/updates
Biofuels gain, but food farms, forests lose
By Lina Sagaral Reyes
Inquirer Mindanao Bureau
December 11, 2007
GOV. SALIPADA K. PENDATUN, Maguindanao--Arcangel Pagculan, the newly elected village chair of Sepaka, has become a jatropha convert after poor rice harvests the past two years.
But using arable land for lucrative biofuels has brought to the fore a Catch-22 situation: Biofuels as a solution to the fossil oil crisis and air pollution can cause food shortages and runaway climate change.
Jatropha, a wild shrub with oily seeds, is locally called tuba-tuba. It is now cultivated in massive scale for biodiesel in several countries, including India, Malawi, Indonesia and Swaziland.
Biodiesel is made from the oil of crops, like jatropha, and other plants, such as soya, palm oil, rape seed and sunflower, mixed with alcohol or used in its pure form.
"I am only using two hectares of my seven-hectare farm for jatropha," Pagculan says, as an experiment. He says the land is rain-fed and has yielded poor harvests due to black bugs in the past years.
"We have an irrigation system, but our farms are only second priority to the banana plantations that grow fruits for export," he says.
Pagculan says he was convinced by the technician sent by the biofuel firm, D One Oil Co., that the switch to jatropha would pay off in Sepaka, once a battleground between the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and government troops.
He will know in a few months if, as the technician says, jatropha will bear fruits within half a year.
If the experimental farm succeeds, he will grow jatropha on most of his seven-hectare property.
Women's loss
For Erlinda Garcia, 49, and several other village women, the rush to plant oil palm or jatropha means losing the patches of cogon grass that they harvest and sell at P17 per sheaf for roofing and the native freshwater snails which abound in ponds now drained for palm oil plantations.
Women used to sell the snails for P5 a liter.
Without rice farms, Garcia and the other women can't be employed anymore as seasonal weeders, gleaners or harvesters.
Without these sources of livelihood, she has to resort to asking for "rejects" at the nearby plant processing banana chips. She recently learned about the technology called odig, meaning "organic, diversified gardening."
"I can plant squash, string beans and other vegetables using organic fertilizers and pesticides," she said.
Biofuels Act
The Philippine Biofuels Act, implemented this year, calls for a mandatory mixing of one-percent biodiesel in petrodiesel and five-percent bioethanol in gasoline.
According to "Up in Smoke," a report on climate change in Asia and the Pacific, this law has "raised fears among some national environmental organizations that the destruction of the country's remaining forests could be accelerated as farmers rush to meet the biofuel demand of one million hectares of jatropha plantations."
The same law also threatens to increase poverty, as the costs of basic commodities are expected to increase as food and fuel crops compete for land and resources.
At least one million hectares of land have been targeted for jatropha plantations.
Jatropha enthusiasts have been saying that the crop should only be planted in unused, less arable and marginal land.
But in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, tracks of arable land for food crops, like rice, are slowly being used as agro-industrial plantations for biofuels.
The plains of Sultan Kudarat, Maguindanao, North Cotabato and South Cotabato are accessible to the P8.5-million pilot processing plant that will be built soon in General Santos City by the Philippine Chamber of Agriculture and Food, with support from the Asian Development Bank.
The international humanitarian organization Oxfam and the environmental group Greenpeace, which published the climate change report, have stressed the need that governments in countries, like the Philippines, promoting the growing of biofuels must have legislation banning the planting of biofuels in lands already used for food crops.
Moratorium
Moreover, the British environmental activist George Monbiot has urged "a five-year moratorium on all government targets and incentives for biofuel."
He is supported by United Nations' special rapporteur Jean Ziegler, who insists that trade should be frozen until second-generation fuels, made from wood or straw or waste, become commercially available.
"Otherwise, the superior purchasing power of drivers in the rich world means that they will snatch food from people's mouths," writes Monbiot.
"If there is one blindingly obvious fact about biofuel, it's that it is not a smallholder crop. It is an internationally traded commodity that travels well and can be stored indefinitely, with no premium for local or organic produce," Monbiot said.
Oil palm grown primarily for its vegetable oil since 1979 in Mindanao is also considered a biofuel alternative, even as the palms, first grown in Africa, are considered by environmentalists most destructive for causing loss of forests in Indonesia and Malaysia.
In Sepaka, oil palm trees are to be planted in about 600 hectares of rented land.
"It is marshy land and the water is often too deep for rice. What they have done is to drain the land, provide drainage canals, which poor farmers cannot afford to make," says Pagculan.
Oil palms, too
The palm oil firm rents the land at P3,500 per hectare a year for 25 years, with a provision for some share in the earnings.
But even unused land has its purpose, scientists say. Monbiot cites a paper published in the Science journal that "suggests that protecting uncultivated land saves, over 30 years, between two and nine times the carbon emissions you might avoid by plowing it and planting biofuels."
Another research group, Monbiot says, has estimated that if the British and European target of a 5-percent contribution from biofuels were to be followed by the rest of the world, the global size of cultivated land would expand by 15 percent. That means the end of most tropical forests. It might also cause runaway climate change.
What will the farmers like Pagculan, switching from rice to jatropha, eat in between while waiting for the jatropha shrubs to bear fruit?
"I have the mechanical plow and the thresher which the rest of the community can rent. I will accept payment in kind, like rice," he said.
But if his fellow rice farmers will follow their leader's example, Pagculan might find himself renting his plow and rice thresher to no one in his own village. Moreover, hunger might be stalking the jatropha and palm oil farms.
