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How a Biofuel 'Miracle' Ruined
Kenyan Farmers

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 — it's a weed.
Sometimes people planted it to fence off their farms, but
usually they just ignored it.

Kenyan market
vendors selling maize in Kagemi .

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.

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

The problems haven't discouraged other
jatropha proponents, either. For several years, Titus Kisavi
traveled the region encouraging farmers to grow the plant,
earning a commission from development groups for the seeds he
sold. These days, however, he doesn't have a job and he spends
his afternoons at a bar near Kibwezi. Still, he hasn't given
up on the plant. "I have a very big passion for jatropha,"
Kisavi said. "I visit farmers and tell them to plant it in the
hope that one day ... somebody will come to the farms and sign
contracts for the seed. We know one day that jatropha will be
in very high demand.

Courtesy: TIME

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