The political ecology of Jatropha plantations for biodiesel in Tamil Nadu, India (original) (raw)
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Ecological Economics
Researchers, policy makers and civil society organizations have been discussing the potential of biofuels as partial substitutes for fossil fuels and thereby as a simultaneous solution for climate change and rural poverty. Research has highlighted the ambiguity of these claims across various dimensions and scales, focusing on ethanol-producing or oilseed crops in agricultural lands or Jatropha-type crops on common lands. We studied the agronomic and economic viability and livelihood impacts of Jatropha curcas plantations on private farms in Tamil Nadu, India. We found that Jatropha yields are much lower than expected and its cultivation is currently unviable, and even its potential viability is strongly determined by water access. On the whole, the crop impoverishes farmers, particularly the poorer and socially backward farmers. Jatropha cultivation therefore not only fails to alleviate poverty, but its aggressive and misguided promotion will generate conflict between the state and the farmers, between different socio-economic classes and even within households. The water demands of the crop can potentially exacerbate the conflicts and competition over water access in Tamil Nadu villages.
Researchers, policy makers and civil society organizations have been discussing the potential of biofuels as partial substitutes for fossil fuels and thereby as a simultaneous solution for climate change and rural poverty. Research has highlighted the ambiguity of these claims across various dimensions and scales, focusing on ethanol-producing or oilseed crops in agricultural lands or Jatropha-type crops on common lands. We studied the agronomic and economic viability and livelihood impacts of Jatropha curcas plantations on private farms in Tamil Nadu, India. We found that Jatropha yields are much lower than expected and its cultivation is currently unviable, and even its potential viability is strongly determined by water access. On the whole, the crop impoverishes farmers, particularly the poorer and socially backward farmers. Jatropha cultivation therefore not only fails to alleviate poverty, but its aggressive and misguided promotion will generate conflict between the state and the farmers, between different socio-economic classes and even within households. The water demands of the crop can potentially exacerbate the conflicts and competition over water access in Tamil Nadu villages.
Energy Policy, 2011
Governments around the world see biofuels as a common solution to the multiple policy challenges posed by energy insecurity, climate change and falling farmer incomes. The Indian government has enthusiastically adopted a second-generation feedstock -the oilseed-bearing shrub, Jatropha curcasfor an ambitious national biodiesel program. Studies estimating the production capacity and potential land use implications of this program have typically assumed that the 'waste land' slated for Jatropha production has no economic value and that no activities of note will be displaced by plantation development. Here we examine the specific local impacts of rapid Jatropha plantation development on rural livelihoods and land use in Rajasthan, India. We find that in Jhadol Tehsil, Jatropha is planted on both government and private land, and has typically displaced grazing and forage collection. For those at the socioeconomic margins, these unconsidered impacts counteract the very benefits that the biofuel programs aim to create. The Rajasthan case demonstrates that local land-use impacts need to be integrated into decision-making for national targets and global biofuel promotion efforts.
Environment and Planning A, 2014
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The local climate–development nexus: jatropha and smallholder adaptation in Tamil
The Kyoto Protocol has initiated Clean Development Mechanism projects in developing countries as one means to offset carbon emitted in developed nations. Biofuels may be a viable solution, but we argue here that it may also compete with local smallholder farming systems and labour resources. This study assesses the integration of tree bio-diesel crop Jatropha curcas into smallholder agriculture in Tamil Nadu, India using data collected from 66 farms through surveys and interviews. Jatropha cultivation carries significant risks for the smallholders. Jatropha competes for space and harvest labour with other market and subsistence crops and does not produce any economic returns until three years after planting. If the jatropha harvests or market price fail or fluctuate, smallholders could default on their loans. This risk could lead to significant changes in the land-holding class structure. Climate change policies, non-governmental organizationss, and national and regional governments should support landholders to sustainably integrate a new crop like jatropha into current holdings, otherwise the current alternative energy revolution could create more problems than it solves. Smallholders are particularly vulnerable to economic risk and crop failure exposure even with well-planned biofuel policies. Keywords: biofuels; Clean Development Mechanism; India; Jatropha curcas; smallholder; Tamil Nadu
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India's 2009 policy on biodiesel remains controversial to date. It excludes voices of marginalized people such as landless workers and knowledges associated with diverse feedstock cultivation practices. It considers the 'upscaling' of biodiesel production to be straightforward, based on easy transferability between diverse socio-material contexts. The policy's marginalization of the immense diversity of India's lands, peoples, perspectives, and practices is based on a neglect of socio-material relations and their multiplicity. A relational analysis highlights the need for alternate inclusive policy processes. Such processes include as evidence the diverse knowledges of interested people and relevant things. They recognize that each entity is known differently depending on how its socio-material relations are approached. Inclusive policy processes also highlight the adjustments that are required to translate a policy out of one socio-material setting and into another. Finally, inclusive policy processes help build realities relying not only on the knowledges from policy experts and firms, but also on the marginalized knowledges of grassroots actors such as smallholders and environmental activists.
Disingenuous forests: A historical political ecology of fuelwood collection in South India
Journal of Historical Geography, 2019
Much of India contains complex and ambiguous post-colonial environmental histories. Within the international clean cookstove development discourse, it is assumed that fuelwood collection for cooking is a significant factor in the overexploitation of forest biomass. This brand of storytelling is certainly applied in India where a series of programs have long targeted household fuelwood collection activities as a way of reversing rates of deforestation. This essay outlines the enigmatic and peculiar environmental histories of two distinct regions in South India. Based on oral histories, interviews and field surveys our findings indicate that many pressures other than fuel collection have helped alter vegetation and reduce fuel availability, particularly the expansion of commercially cultivated land in recent years. Moreover, a variety of historical contingencies, such as mass displacement from dam construction and the deliberate seeding of an invasive species complicate one-dimensional or reductive explanations of landscape change — a discursive environmental rendering referred to here as a ‘disingenuous nature’. Through retrospective analysis, we describe how this land use narrative, like so many other sustainable development discourses premised on incomplete and misleading information, is the byproduct of a ‘multi-scale narrative repurposing and sector coalescence’ process. This characterization signals how environmental narratives are repurposed and recycled uncritically by actors in distinct yet discursively compatible development sectors.
Current Science
North East India is a biodiversity-rich zone and a part of both the Himalaya and Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspots. It is a large-scale multipurpose landscape consisting of a mosaic of crops, livestock and forest. The landscape also ensures almost all the ecosystem services that contribute to the well-being of more than 100 diverse ethnic groups (indigenous people) in the region. However, in recent years, rapid transition in the form of promotion and expansion of oil palm and rubber plantations as mooted and supported by the state has posed threats to the ecosystem and biodiversity especially the biocultural landscapes. Supported by empirical evidence (primary and secondary data), this study argues that as we increase the intensity of production or harvest of such crops, the environmental cost becomes unprecedented and immense to be offset by economic gain. The use of renewable biological resources as the foundation for a bioeconomy must be regulated in terms of environmental impact rather than short-term financial dividends. Therefore, we need to develop optimization models for the biocultural landscape(s) that determine land use based on what is both economically and environmentally optimal.