How a Biofuel 'Miracle' Ruined Kenyan Farmers

By Nick Wadhams / Kibwezi Sunday, Oct. 04, 2009

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 â€" 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 â€" 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 â€" they're covered with thick green leaves and fruit. But
Muoki says he did almost nothing the government experts told him to Do â€"
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?")

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1927538,00.html