Jatropha: wonder crop? Experience from Swaziland

May 2009

The search for alternatives to fossil fuel has seen a rush towards biofuels. This is contributing to rising food prices and increasing concern about our ability to grow enough food and fuel. Despite social and environmental concerns and unproven climate benefits of biofuels, the EU has set a target of 10 per cent road of transport fuel to come from biofuels by 2020. Against this backdrop, jatropha (Jatropha curcas) has been promoted by UK biofuel company D1 Oils as a wonder crop because of the plant’s ability to grow on marginal and semi-arid land, saying “it will not compete with food crops for good agricultural land”.1 Local non-government organisations (NGOs) have raised concerns about the social and environmental impacts of jatropha and studies have questioned some of the claims made about jatropha’s benefits. This report highlights those concerns for media and policy makers and questions some of the claims being made by D1 Oils and others for biofuel from jatropha. This report looks at D1 Oils’ activities in Swaziland, one of the countries where the company is leading the development of jatropha plantations. The report is based on first-hand evidence from farmers involved with D1 Oils and desk research on the impacts of jatropha.
By revealing major problems with jatropha production as a biofuel crop, this report poses questions for policy makers who are relying on the plant as a part of a future sustainable biofuel mix.
This report concludes that jatropha is not likely to be a silver bullet that will help the UK and EU meet their biofuel targets sustainably or solve the world’s energy needs. The oil yield from jatropha when it is grown on marginal or waste land with no water, fertiliser or pesticide input is at best uncertain. The high yields needed to make jatropha commercially viable as a biofuel crop are far more likely to be obtained when it is planted on fertile irrigated land. This could mean that widespread jatropha plantations for biodiesel compete with food production for fertile agricultural land. While jatropha is not a food crop, the use of the plant for biofuels still raises issues about competition with land use and food production. The experience from Swaziland, backed up by various scientific studies, implies that policy makers in the EU and UK need to treat jatropha with the same degree of rigour as other biofuel crops.

By: H. Burley, H. Griffiths (Friends of the Earth)

 
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