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 ::
Article continues
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 ::
Article continues
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Annual plants adapt to global warming better than long-living species
This finding suggests that quick-growing plants such as weeds may cope better with global warming than slower-growing plants such as Redwood trees -- a phenomenon that could lead to future changes in the Earth's plant life. It could also influence the long-term choices on which energy crops to grow in a world of rapid climate change.
Arthur Weis and researchers Steven Franks and Sheina Sim studied field mustard (Brassica rapa), a weedy plant found throughout the Northern Hemisphere (coincidentally a potential biofuel feedstock - see profile at the Handbook of Energy Crops). In a greenhouse, they grew mustard plants at the same time from seeds collected near the UCI campus in the spring of 1997 -- two years before a five-year drought -- and seeds collected after the drought in the winter of 2004. Seeds can remain dormant but alive for years and be revived with a little water and light. The plants were divided into three groups, each receiving different amounts of water mimicking precipitation patterns ranging from drought to very wet conditions. In all cases, the post-drought generation flowered earlier, regardless of the watering scheme.
This shift in genetic timing was further confirmed with an experiment that crossed the ancestors and descendents. As predicted, the intergenerational hybrids had an intermediate flowering time:
biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: energy :: sustainability :: climate change :: evolutionary biology :: adaptation :: plant breeding ::
"Early winter rainfall did not change much during the drought, but the late winters and springs were unusually dry. This precipitation pattern put a selective pressure on plants to flower earlier, especially annual plants like field mustard," Franks said. "During drought, early bloomers complete seed production before the soil dries out, whereas late bloomers wither before they can seed."
The technique of growing ancestors and descendents at the same time allowed the scientists to determine that the change in flower timing was in fact an evolutionary shift -- not a simple reaction to changing weather conditions. This method, pioneered by Albert Bennett, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and acting dean of the School of Biological Sciences at UCI, has been used with bacteria, but this is the first study to make full use of it with a plant species. Bennett and his colleagues froze ancestral strains of E. coli so they could evaluate the bacterium's adaptive evolution after culturing it at elevated temperatures for thousands of generations.
Today, Weis is the organizing chairman of Project Baseline, a national effort to collect and preserve seeds from contemporary plant populations. Decades from now, plant biologists will be able to "resurrect" these ancestral generations and compare them to their descendents. By that time, advanced DNA technology may make it possible to sequence the entire genome of individual plants and at low cost. If so, biologists will be able to measure how much plants have evolved with climate change and pinpoint the evolution's underlying genetic basis.
Scientists expect global warming to alter air circulation patterns over the Pacific Ocean, and climate models predict frequent and extreme fluctuations in precipitation along the coast, which likely will affect plant life.
"If we go out today and collect a large number of seeds and freeze them, they will be a resource available to the next generation of scientists," Weis said. "Because of global warming, the evolution explosion is already under way. If we act now, we'll have the tools necessary to determine in the future how species respond to climate change."
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posted by Biopact team at 6:47 PM 0 comments links to this post