Latest Articles by Terry Slavin

When oil grows on trees

Terry Slavin — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 10:46:00 +0000

India’s new biofuel bonanza could revitalise its wastelands – or starve its poor. Terry Slavin assesses the perils and the promise of jatropha.

India’s dreams of weaning itself off expensive oil imports rest heavily on a single lowly bush, the jatropha.

Imports of oil, already a worrying 70%, are growing fast, and reliance on diesel fuel is growing at the fastest clip of all. India’s stated goal over the next five years is to replace a fifth of its entire diesel consumption with biodiesel derived from the seeds of the jatropha plant.

Several states have aggressive planting programmes and tens of thousands of small farmers have been given loans to grow it. UK biofuels company D1 Oil, which has planted 156,000 hectares of the stuff, last year went into a £160 million joint venture with BP to plant up one million hectares, most of it in India.

The success of all this activity will be known in another year, when the first substantial harvests are due. But can biofuels really be an answer for India, when alarm bells are ringing all over the globe about the critical shortages of food and water caused by land being turned over to grow them?

The Indian government thinks so, and for one simple reason: because it thrives in arid soil, jatropha need not compete with food. Research by TERI (The Energy Resource Institute) found that half the 60 million hectares of land now classed as wasteland in India would be suitable for jatropha cultivation.

But critics worry that even if jatropha can be grown on marginal land with little water, it does so best on soil also suitable for food crops. Instead of farmers growing it on small landholdings, as they have been encouraged to do until now, say the critics, the jatropha industry will evolve into enormous monoculture plantations, gobbling up vast amounts of arable land.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that some farmers given generous loans from the government to plant the bush on marginal land had already reported financial losses after poor yields. Jutta Kill, climate campaigner at Fern, a European NGO that monitors carbon trading, says: “If you want good fruits that are high in biofuel content then you need good land. If you were to grow jatropha on degraded land, you get lots of flowers but little fruit.”

Steve Douty, who is responsible for developing D1’s India operations, insists that jatropha need not hurt India’s food security. He concedes that the plant grows best when irrigated, but adds: “The message we put out is grow it as an additional crop, intercropped with food crops, so when you are irrigating your food you are irrigating jatropha as well.”

Mark Runacres, who is also a director of D1, points out that seeds are only part of the value of the jatropha to rural economies. He says the cuttings can be burned as biomass, and the cake by-product can make good quality soap. The seeds can even be burned in lamps as a clean substitute for kerosene, which the government spends billions of dollars subsidising because it is the only light source for millions of people.

But India’s 20% diesel target won’t just be met by small farmers. Jatropha will likely be part of the Green India initiative announced by the Council on Climate Change, under which six million hectares of state land is to be leased out to companies for afforestation.

Meanwhile, some of India’s biggest players are already investing in jatropha. Industrial giant Reliance has planted thousands of hectares, and its life sciences division is developing transgenic high-yielding varieties of the plant and looking at bioreactors to mass-produce jatropha oil. Reliance chairman Mukesh Ambani recently said a biofuels revolution could set India on a new development path, with agriculture at its heart. “It is possible to develop hybrid and transgenic technologies to use marginal land for the production of biofuels crops,” he said. “It is possible to create a whole value chain that links the marginal farmer with global energy markets.” And, with characteristic bullishness, he added: “In the process, we can put more wealth into the hands of Indian farmers, instead of wealthy sheiks in desert kingdoms.”

Terry Slavin is a freelance journalist based in London

This article appears in “Monsoons & miracles: India’s search for a sustainable future”, a special supplement produced by Green Futures magazine www.greenfutures.org.uk

Homepage photo by R. K. Henning

Under the weather in India

Terry Slavin, Malini Mehra — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:08:00 +0000

Climate change will bring India the wrong rain in the wrong places. Fierce flooding will ruin lives, while India’s rivers and soil are sucked dry by drought, write Terry Slavin and Malini Mehra.

2007 brought ‘wild weather’ to South Asia. The worst floods in living memory killed thousands and displaced over 20 million more. But they were just a taste of what awaits India as the planet heats up, say climate scientists.

Average summer rainfall across the subcontinent could increase by about 10%, largely because a warmer Indian Ocean will be able to hold more water. But it will be the wrong kind of rain and in the wrong place. It will fall less frequently, but much more fiercely; there will be fewer rainy days, but the number and intensity of destructive rains, such as those which triggered last summer’s floods, will increase.

Since rain-fed agriculture makes up 70% of farmed land, increased drought will have a devastating impact on India’s rural economy. It will struggle to feed its fast-growing population – expected to hit 1.5 billion by 2030. By the end of this century, crop yields could be 70% less than they are now, raising the prospect of mass starvation.

The misery will be compounded by sea levels, which are set to rise by at least 40 centimetres by 2100, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inundating vast areas, including some of India’s most densely populated cities, whose populations will be forced to migrate inland, or build defensive dykes. Already, islands and villages in the Bay of Bengal have been lost to sea-level rise, causing a drift of ecological refugees to Kolkata.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC [see “We need a new Gandhi”], last year warned that the rural poor, who make up 70% of India’s population, would have no choice but to migrate to larger towns and cities, compounding existing problems of inadequate urban infrastructure and burgeoning slum populations. Meanwhile, temperatures will increase all year round, with heat during the dry pre-monsoon months of April and May (already so high some years that they kill thousands), soaring to dangerous new levels.

Scientists are quick to acknowledge that predicting the Indian weather is a notoriously inexact science. A background report for the Stern Review admitted that current climate models fall short in this area, where ocean, atmosphere, land surface and mountains all interact. But that very unpredictability is in itself one of the most worrying aspects for India.

There’s a growing consensus, however, that one of the most severe effects will be on the glaciers of the Himalayas. Their meltwater currently supplies up to 85% of the flow of the Ganga, Brahmaputra and Indus rivers. Latest IPCC estimates suggest that they may shrink to one-fifth of their volume within a few decades. Initially this will cause floods as the waters melt – and then a water crisis of unprecedented proportions as the rivers dry.

Analysts tell us that future wars will be fought around resources such as water. Seven of the world’s major river basins originate in the Himalayan and Tibetan plateaus. They are the source of water for 40% of humanity. China, India, Nepal, Bhutan and Burma all share these borders. If the rivers do run dry, a more serious cause of regional destabilisation can scarcely be imagined.

For the 700 million Indians who live on the land, climate change brings confusion and helplessness, as people lose their traditional capacity to ‘read’ the weather and adjust accordingly. When the rains don’t come and when the natural world doesn’t behave as it should, societies which have survived by observing the world and adapting to it lose essential coping skills. Climate change, at a most profound level, disempowers by rendering traditional knowledge useless.

So how well is India planning for these multiple assaults from a changing climate? On a scale of 1 to 10, says Pachauri, India’s preparation stands at 0.5.

Terry Slavin is a freelance journalist based in London

Malini Mehra is the founder and chief executive of Centre for Social Markets. In 2007, she was named as an “Asia 21 Young Leader” by the Asia Society. She has been featured on CNN and BBC World, and in Time and Fortune magazines.

This article appears in “Monsoons & miracles: India’s search for a sustainable future”, a special supplement produced by Green Futures magazine www.greenfutures.org.uk

Homepage photo by alle4minuten