Development and environmental groups complained that the EU drive to increase production and use of bio-fuels is leading to the poor in Africa having their land taken off them, in order to grow fuel crops that would be exported to Europe.
The activists claim that EU companies have acquired or requested 5 million hectares of land in developing countries for industrial biofuels.
In Africa land is already under increasing pressure and poor farmers are, it is alleged, being pushed off the land, into poverty and hunger, as the EU tries to green its energy sources. The protest comes ahead of member states submitting their fuel plans in response to the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive. The plan calls for 10% of Europe’s fuels to come from renewable sources. Experts suggest that much of this is going to be provided by bio-fuels, but that could require up to 17.5 million hectares. According to the EC, the target would only require some 2 – 5 million hectares.
The European Commission recently announced that it was asking industry, governments and NGOs to set up certification schemes for all types of biofuels, including those imported into the EU. Günther Oettinger, Commissioner responsible for Energy, said: “In the years to come, biofuels are the main alternative to petrol and diesel used in transport, which produces more than 20% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union. We have to ensure that the biofuels used are also sustainable.
Our certification scheme is the most stringent in the world and will make sure that our biofuels meet the highest environmental standards. It will have positive effects also on other regions as it covers imported biofuels.” However, the certification schemes would be voluntary and contain prohibitions agains land with high biodiversity, forests, wetlands and nature protection areas. It is less clear about the use of agricultural land. New Europe spoke to David Barissa Ringa, Action Aid’s Policy Research Coordinator for Kenya’s Coast Region.
How much land has been taken from people?
Hundreds of thousands of hectares have already been taken by various companies, and they are all out to grab lands and grow biofuels in Kenya. There’s one company from Italy, for instance, that has taken 50,000 hectares in Malindi district, in the north of Kenya. They were granted a lease by the council for 33 years, to plant for biodiesel.
This will impact on thousands of people, this area is inhabited by over 23,000 people and the project will displace around 15,000 of them. This biodiesel project is really displacing people from their livelihoods and causing a lot of trouble with food security.
If so many people are being affected, how did it get approved?
That’s the question we’ve been asking the government and the local authority said they had consulted the people, but when we wnet and asked the people, they said they were not consulted, they were not even told where this project was going to be put. It is affecting their homesteads and the nearby forest, because the forest is part of the project. The investors had already started cutting down the trees.
The European Commission is looking at a certification scheme and one of the criteria is that using forested land is completely forbidden. Why are they doing something that will dissalllow them from being certified?
That is the contradiction we are seeing. On the one hand, government agencies say they want to increase the amount of land under forest cover. On the other, they are also granting concessions to projects like this, that are cutting down the trees. It’s easy to clear a forest, much harder to reinstate one.
Is this the mechanism companies have to acquire land, through local governments?
Most of the leases were extended by local authorities. The authorities do not buy or sell land, but lease it. They hold the land in trust for the community, but they do not consult with them on what is done with it. The law is such that once you sign over a lease, the local communities lose all control of it. It is totally in the hands of the investor.
What are you wanting the EU to do?
Right now, they are thinking of increasing biofuel production. That has a lot of negative impacts. If you dedicate land for biofuel production, in essence, what you are doing is removing it from food production. Therefore we are calling the EU to consider granting African states support to ensure they are self sufficient in food production, rather than encourage us to go into biofuel production, which is not a priority for most African countries.
A lot of the problems in governance in Africa are at the middle levels and there have been improvements in standards at the higher levels. Is there anything that the Kenyan national government is doing about this situation?
There have been quite a lot of reforms going on and part of the reason we’ve been having these problems in the past is because the laws were poorly drafted. Therefore people would take advantage of loopholes. In fact now, we have a national land policy that grants rights of ownership of land to the citizens and communities, other than having land administered on their behalf by officials that did really not care about the people.
Could this be a mechanism to get the land back?
Exactly. The new constitution is addressing some of these historical injustices and it goes a long way and proposes mechanisms to ensure that land management will be happening at the village level, instead of the national level, so any concessions that will have to be granted, will have to be in consultation with the people, not government bureaucrats, as has been happening in the past.
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