Reporter: The rise of biofuels and land grabbing
1,889 views · Published 30 October 2012 · 4:17 · Indexed 17 October 2026
Channel: European Parliament · 2012 · News & Politics
After the 2007 food crisis and the dramatic increase in agricultural raw material prices. a race began to acquire land in poorer countries, a new phenomenon called land grabbing. EuroparlTV went to assess its impact in Mozambique, which is rich in fertile land but unable to satisfy its people's demand for food. Luis Muchanga, the director of UNAC, the National Peasants' Union of Mozambique, coordinates research into land grabbing, a growing phenomenon, despite the fact that the law, theoretically, should be able to protect small landowners from large foreign companies. There is systematic violation of land law in Mozambique. This systematic violation translates as land grabbing. Since 2007, pressure has increased. Coincidently, the pressure increases at the exact moment when biofuel production in Mozambique intensifies. When the pressure to find or introduce biofuels in Mozambique began, so did the pressure to find land and so did conflicts. A happy coexistence between cultivating crops on fertile land and developing biofuels on barren or marginal land seems like a mirage to Luis Muchanga. In reality, biofuels are produced on fertile land, which could be used to produce food. Producing food and not biofuels is this country's priority, at least in the state it finds itself today. We travel from Maputo to Chimoio, capital of Manica province in the west. Sun Biofuels, a British-based company, is located here. It specialises in growing jatropha, a plant that produces oily berries which are ideal for biodiesel production. Sun Biofuels, established here for four years, occupies hundreds of hectares of former tobacco-producing land and provides work for 536 people. For financial director Shawne Botha, the farmers haven't lost their land. The process involves communication with the local populace before you even get the land. There's a procedure which is followed in order to get land. We have followed it. Everything appears legal at this plantation, which aims to modernise Mozambique's underdeveloped agricultural sector. They learn from the agricultural processes around them, carried out by commercial companies. They're learning what seeds to use, how to fertilise, all these things. We run a big local community farm scheme. No official comment from the land registry office in Chimoio, while for David Monasse, member of a farmers' cooperative for 20 years, land is a precious asset that the people risk losing. The land has been taken and has been devastated. There are many problems, it's not just jatropha. On one hand the right to grow crops to live and create a local market, on the other the investment of large sums of money into biofuel production, bringing work and modernising agriculture. All this in a country dependent on foreign aid and keen to attract major investment. The debate over land grabbing in Mozambique is complex, but is similar to many other African situations where the European aim to tackle global warming plays a central role. The World Bank documents some 450 projects for which we have data concerning the commodity produced on these projects, and in 21% of these the purpose of the investor is to produce energy, to produce energy crops and to develop agrofuel plantations. The problem with this is that in most cases these projects do not benefit the local population. They actually are controlled by a small number of large transnational corporations and they serve to use the resources from the global south to feed the thirst for renewable energies in the north. I think it is a very worrying phenomenon. It will worsen the pressures on land. The EU, faced with a 10% target for biofuels by 2020, plays a crucial role in the land grabbing situation, both in Mozambique and in many other developing countries. EuroparlTV video ID: 3e13c697-a47b-4528-a39a-a01500a316df
