The Mozambican government is continuing to look for investors for biofuel production in Massingir district, in the southern province of Gaza, despite earlier disappointment.
This was disclosed in Maputo on Thursday by Helio Neves, biofuel programme coordinator at the Agricultural Promotion Centre (CEPAGRI), during a workshop on current biofuel initiatives in the country.
According to Neves, "the government never abandoned the ethanol project in Massingir, and launched a tender earlier this year. By the end of the year we will announce the new investor".
Eugenio Buquina, from the company Prospectus Consultoria Lda, told the seminar that a recent study showed that "most biofuel projects are at an intermediate stage of development, using only 50 per cent of the land acquired. They are yet to run at full steam".
To overcome this problem, and cases where vast swathes of land remain idle, the Ministry of Agriculture through the National Directorate of Land and Forests has decided to resize the land granted to investors or simply revoke licenses.
This was the case with "Project Procana", which was one of the first projects for biofuel production to be approved by the government.
Project Procana was to be implemented in Massingir, with ethanol produced from sugar cane grown on a 30,000 hectare plantation. But the government cancelled the contract in December 2009 because there was no sign of the 500 million US dollars of promised investment.
Procana was owned by Sable Mining, a company registered in the British Virgin Islands, and all it had done since signing the contract in 2007 was to clear 800 of the 30,000 hectares allocated to it.
