(Bio)Fueling Injustice? - Europafrica

services delivery project of the Directorate-General for Energy, which
seems prompted by a genuine desire for integrated rural
development. A plan for the development of the agrofuel industry, still
under elaboration during the mission, would provide for the transfer of
large areas of arable land to foreign investors for the production of
agrofuels. The Italian company Green Waves has reportedly secured
the exploitation of 250,000 hectares for sunflower cultivation; the
French firm Géocoton (formerly Dagris) has begun to produce
agrofuels from seed cotton; and information has been received on a
project to turn over 400,000 hectares to palm oil cultivation in the
south of Benin in order to produce biodiesel for export by foreign
investors. 532
Data coming from companies confirm this trend. The International Sustainability and
Carbon Certification – a bioenergy certification agency recognised by the European
Commission as a voluntary scheme valid to import biofuels to the EU – confirmed that
“at the moment, there are on-going activities with certification for jatropha from Africa,
South America and Asia, in different states of development”. 533 The websites of
companies explicitly state they have made large-scale biofuel related investments in
African land:
The Italian Nuove Iniziative Industriali Srl acquired 50,000 ha in Senegal. 534
Overall, the company has announced to have acquired 840,000 ha in 4 African
countries (including Kenya) to produce biofuels for the European market; 535
The British GEM BioFuels “has entered into 18 agreements with Communes in
relation to 452,500 hectares of land suitable for the establishment of
plantations in Madagascar, which provide it with the exclusive right to establish
Jatropha plantations on the land. To date approximately 55,700 hectares have
been planted.” 536
The Swiss Addax Bioenergy is exploiting 14,300 ha in Sierra Leone to produce
ethanol partly for export. 537
The French company Tereos has sugar cane plantations in Mozambique, 538
where it would exploit 98,000 ha until 2023. 539
The Guardian also compiled a database of biofuels projects in Africa with the help of
the University of California Berkeley's Africa Reporting Project, which shows that
European companies are major actors in investing for agrofuels in Africa. The
independent research cross-checked projects, and identified 3.2m hectares of land
acquired for biofuel production in Africa – in countries from Mozambique to Senegal –
half of which is linked to 11 British companies (see Table 2 and Table 3) 540 . This
reliable data revealed by The Guardian demonstrates the role of European investors in
acquiring land for biofuels in Africa.
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