The new scramble for Africa

Jul 2007

Africa, with its large land area and cheap labour, is an obvious target for agrofuel developers. As one European agrofuel lobby group likes to point out, just 15 African countries – nicknamed the “green Opec” – have a combined arable land base larger than India available for agrofuel crop production. And already millions of hectares of the continent’s so-called “fallow” lands have been surveyed and allocated for agrofuels.
According to the author, agrofuels will not improve the lot of the mass of African people for various reasons.
First, the poor simply cannot afford them because they do not have money to buy energy, but rely on wood, charcoal and dung. Secondly, it makes no sense for rural families to replace their sustainable and food-secure agricultural systems and forests with foreign-owned industrial plantations and in the process become cheap and dispensable labour. Thirdly, the privatisation of the land that is the source of Africa’s wealth will undermine any chance that African countries have of determining their own future.

By: GRAIN - Seedling

 
download this document:   764 kb
home