Posted on 09/06/2008 2:26:47 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Africa Becoming a Biofuel Battleground
By Horand Knaup
Western companies are pushing to acquire vast stretches of African land to meet the world's biofuel needs. Local farmers and governments are being showered with promises. But is this just another form of economic colonialism?
Everything will turn out alright. Correction: everything is going to get better. There will be new roads, a new school, a pharmacy, even a proper water supply. Most of all, there will be jobs -- 5,000, at the very least. "If there are jobs for us, then it's a good thing," says Juma Njagu, 26, who hopes to be able to leave his meager existence as a planter and charburner behind soon.
Njagu lives in Mtamba, a village of about 1,100 souls in Tanzania's Kisarawe district, about 70 kilometers (43 miles) south-west of Dar es Salaam, the capital and largest city. Mtamba, accessible by dirt road, is a place where people scrape by on a bit of farming, a bit of fishing and the production of charcoal. There isn't much else in Mtamba.
That could change if the British firm Sun Biofuels goes ahead with plans to produce biodiesel fuel from "Jatropha curcas," an energy plant with a high oil content, which it hopes to plant on Kisarawe's farmland.
The Tanzanian government has granted the British firm the use of 9,000 hectares (22,230 acres) of sparsely populated farmland, or enough land to cover about 12,000 soccer fields, for a period of 99 years -- free of charge. In return, the company will invest about $20 million (€13 million) to build roads and schools, bringing a modicum of prosperity to the region.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
Ping!
Jatropha is notable for its ability to thrive in marginal, low rainfall areas, and for the lack of maintenance (labor) required for upkeep once it is established.
The jobs referenced will almost certainly be one-time for the clearing and planting, followed by seasonal work for harvest of the oil-bearing seeds. A few permanent jobs at a rendering / processing plant.
Sub-Saharan Africa, once again, appears to be more than happy to be exploited for the short-end money. And it was ever thus.
Africa has uranium in hugh quantities compared to the rest of the world. That's why investment is there.
Africa's farming techniques without white colonialism is limited to scratching the dirt with a stick.
No! Non-Africans are going to grow stuff where only weeds are now growing.
Due to the law of the jungle few Africans waste time planting crops that will either be burnt by their enemies or stolen by their neighbors. Others with power and money have to come in first and enforce private property rights before anything can get done.
Like any other orchard based business. Seasonal is better than nothing, and they may end up finding other work in the interim.
The Rhodesians have learned this too well.
Apparently to buy grain from first-world farmers and then pass it out free in the third-world thereby putting African farmers out of business when there is not enough profit from their smaller hand cultivated plots at artificially low food prices. If ethanol and bio-diesel production raise the local cost of food in Africa, maybe local farming will one day be profitable enough to resume. In the meanwhile they die from poverty in a land rich in potential resources squandered by incompetent African leaders.
But is this just another form of economic colonialism?
Yes, and you'd better accept or you'll be eating your own dung for another generation.
In none of these places are the needs of local residents taken into account.
I call B.S. The locals can only benefit from the infusion of cash, intelligence, and civilization into their backwards tribal squalor. To not do something like this would be the biggest crime.
To make matters worse, large mining zones were fenced off and became inaccessible to the original residents.
They wouldn't have paid good money to fence it all off if the Africans could have respected the property of others. You can't run a business if the locals loot your job site every night. Their is a reason that a continent as rich in resources as Africa is in a continual state of anarchy. The ignorance, bad morals, and lack of self control exhibited by the inhabitants have eventually run off all but a few businesses which remain by totally opposing the locals desire to pillage the goose who is laying their golden eggs. In many backwards places they'll let foreigners come in and set up a profitable industry, only to nationalize it and have it looted into bankruptcy within a year. Africa was way better off when they were ruled by colonial powers who disdained their heathen culture and shot looters with impunity. Nobody starved, roads were built, wells were dug and kept clean, land was farmed efficiently, infrastructure was built, churches, hospitals, schools, and shops sprang up. But socialism islam and other degenerate bush religions chased the colonizers out and returned Africa to the vast dung heap it now is.
Good rundown and reply. I’d often wondered what would happen had one of the smaller nations in Africa or South America benefitted from a majority population of Europeans or North Asians. It would be interesting to see how well Peru would be doing (or not doing) were the country of majority Japanese extraction.
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