Turning pest into profit: but who created the pest in the first place?

In his series of essays titled 'How the World Works', Andrew Leonard offers a sharp view of some of the most challenging issues arising from the rapid globalisation of technology, science, trade and commerce, and how this affects the Global South.

In his analyses, Leonard often takes an ordinary story from the day's news, but deconstructs it, offers suggestions and criticism and puts the story in a new context so that it opens a new series of questions. In a piece titled 'Invader bush and the Namibian savanna', he follows up on the idea of using the pest for bioenergy, which we described earlier.

But Leonard asks a highly interesting question that can be asked for many other 'pest-into-profit' ventures: who created the problem in the first place, and what can we learn from these past mistakes?

The invador bush that plagues Namibia's grasslands is the result of over-grazing by cattle farmers in conjunction with the suppression of naturally occurring fires. In short, quick economic gain in the past has resulted in environmental degradation and consequent economic losses in the present:

I understand the attraction of transforming a nasty weed into an enlightening power source, we shouldn't lose sight of the depressing reality that it was human intervention that screwed up the eco-balance in Namibia, and unless we're extraordinarily careful, our "solutions" to the problems we've caused will only make matters worse. Suppose, for example, the electricity generation plan is a huge success, and there is suddenly a strong economic incentive to hack down all the acacia bushes currently making life so hard for cattle. Complete eradication of the invader bush, declares the bush encroachment report, would further destabilize the savanna.

We would go one step further and highlight the irony of some of the social aspects of the problem. Cattle farmers and ranchers made good profits from degrading the Namibian savanna. Their actions were largely to blame for triggering the invasion of the shrubs. And guess who is asking the Namibian (and European) government today to release massive funds to eradicate the pest? Exactly, the very same cattle farmers who caused it in the first place.

Now government intervention usually relies on utilising money that was collected via taxes levied (progressively or not) on the entire population of a country. In this case, all Namibians would have to contribute to solving a costly problem that was created by only a handful of them. The principle of 'pest-provoker pays' does not hold here:
biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: energy :: invader bush :: ecology :: social sustainability :: decentralisation :: energy security :: Namibia ::

The Namibian case offers an interesting inroads into exploring the the tensions between social and environmental sustainability of bioenergy on the one hand, and commercial gain on the other.

The costly interventions to eradicate the pest that were proposed earlier (chemical treatment, controlled burning of the lands) and that would have relied on contributions from all Namibians, have been abandoned and replaced by a proposal the nature of which hints at potential returns for all Namibians. The idea is to use the bushes as a bioenergy feedstock that will fuel a decentralised energy paradigm that might bring much needed electricity to some of the poorest. In principle, such a decentralised energy system can have a redistributive and progressive function, benefiting those who have been abandoned by both the state and the economy.

However, for this to happen, the accent should be shifted radically from the past stress on simple 'commercial gain', to social and environmental sustainability - guaranteed and monitored by government and science. Leonard:

In a perfect world, careful scientists working together with responsible government officials might be able to figure out just how much human commercial activity the savanna could bear, and put into effect policy recommendations that kept everything hanging together.

Leonard quotes from the report on invader bush which we linked to, and which indicates that a careful balance between economic gain and environmental sustainbility is crucial:

The potential wood available for harvesting varies between 10 and 20 tonnes per hectare in the different districts, and total yield is largely influenced by the prevailing invader species. Care needs to be taken that these considerations will not become more important than ecological considerations. Thus, harvesting should take place in accordance with ecological principles.

Mistakes from the past (often the result of a primitive modernistic ideology based on a disconnect between nature and economy), have allowed scientists to learn more about Namibia's complex savanna ecology. This knowledge must now form the basis of a pest-into-profit project that is genuinely sustainable.

After all, bioenergy is not automatically an environmentally friendly or socially sustainable form of energy production. Things can go two ways. If implemented badly, bioenergy projects can mimic and perpetuate the energy paradigm of the past, which was based on uncareful resource extraction and on economics that lead to inequality and to the concentration of capital and power. But in principle, biofuels and bioenergy do offer the potential to build another future. Namibia can cut itself loose from the idea that mere market forces should determine what a country's energy economy should look like. Instead, it can choose for the alternative. And in this case, it might mean that some of the invader bushes are left for what they really are: nature's response to a broken ecological balance.