Burkina Faso: enhancing food security by growing biofuel crops

Quicknote bioenergy economics
The West-African country of Burkina Faso offers us an interesting example of how investments in biofuel production help enhance the food security of small farmers and alleviate the endemic poverty that affects rural populations. 80% of the entire Burkinabese workforce is dependent on small-scale agriculture.

Burkina Faso is one of the largest producers of cotton, on a per capita basis. Some 500,000 people are directly employed in growing cotton, 2 million indirectly (roughly one in five of all Burkinabese people, and 1 in 3 households). The cash crop represents 5 to 10% of the country's GDP, 30% of its export revenues and 60% of all agriculture related incomes. In short, as the Burkinabese themselves say, "cotton means life".

Now a look at the micro-economics of agriculture at the household level reveals some interesting facts which are important for the biofuels debate. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) [*French], despite the low cotton prices of recent years, farmers who grow the crop in combination with food crops such as maize, form the healthiest group amongst the rural population. Both their incomes, their health status as well as their food security and nutritional status are better than those of farmers who grow food crops only (in this case maize, millet and sorghum). Despite often heard critiques to the contrary, growing a cash crop can indeed be beneficial. By doing so, small farmers get linked up to a world market and take advantages of dedicated infrastructures which make their production competitive; whereas 'autarkic' food farmers operate in very small, local markets only. The reasons behind the WHO findings are easy to understand: cotton-farmers receive relatively high extra cash incomes (compared to food farmers), which they spend on food, education and health.

But over-dependence on a single, globally traded cash-crop, like cotton, of course holds its own risks. The biofuels opportunity offers a way out. For this reason, Burkina Faso is going to diversify away from cotton by investing in sunflowers for biofuels. Assessments of the country's potential are bright: there is enough suitable land to satisfy both the food, fuel and fibre needs of the rapidly growing populations, as well as to grow feedstocks for an export-ortiented biofuels industry. On the level of the Burkinabese state, expenditures on costly oil can be cut, and the savings invested in poverty alleviation, education and health care. For the small farmers, the logic will be the same as with cotton: those who invest in all three crops (biofuels, fibres, food), will have more stable and secure incomes, with which they can enhance their food security status and combat poverty, than those who stick to producing food crops only. They will remain at the bottom of the pyramid.

This logic only holds in countries where the market is not constrained by competition between land for food and land for non-food crops (which would drive up prices for both). Burkina Faso is one such country. Obviously, the complexity of such micro-economic analyses would take us to far here, but the WHO's findings on the food security situation of Burkinabese cotton farmers definitely reveal an important element of the debate on biofuels in the South [entry ends here].
biodiesel :: biobutanol :: biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: energy :: sustainability :: poverty alleviation :: food security :: crop diversification :: rural development :: Burkina Faso :: Africa ::