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Agrofuel projects threaten Mozambique's forests

According to an article from the Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique, recently posted to allAfrica.com, Mozambican NGOs are raising the alarm that agrofuel production may threaten Mozambique's forests.


The government of Mozambique has approved the first “mega-projects” that will open up hundreds of thousands of hectares of land to the cultivation of agrofuel inputs, prompting the head of a local NGO to express alarm at the potentially negative consequences for forests. Carlos Serra, coordinator of the Mozambican NGO Amigos da Floresta (“Friends of the Forest”), has warned that government sponsored expansion of agriculture to support agrofuels production will exacerbate the threat to Mozambique’s forests. The country's forests are already in jeopardy from the persistence of illegal timber exploitation. Serra has urged that the government of Mozambique ramp up its efforts to curtail illegal logging, as the country’s cadre of forestry inspectors is undermanned, ill-equipped, and lacks the capacity to effectively oversee all of Mozambique’s forests.

 

Although the government has vowed not to use fertile agricultural land for the cultivation of agrofuel inputs, its plans to exploit so called marginal lands raises the prospect that wide tracts of forestland will be cleared to make way for agrofuels projects, according to Serra. To date, one such project has already been approved; it entails planting 30,000 hectares of sugarcane that is to be used for the production of ethanol. Serra says that deforestation is already a serious problem confronting Mozambique, and that the failure to rein in illegal logging coupled with the expansion of agrofuels projects worsens the danger to Mozambican forests. In response to these challenges, Amigos da Floresta has launched a campaign that promotes environmental education and seeks to build awareness on the importance of forests.

 

Read the article in its entirety here.


Note: Agrofuels are agricultural products grown on a large scale, frequently in monoculture industrial plantations, for the specific purpose of processing into liquid fuel such as ethanol or biodiesel. Agrofuel inputs include sugar cane, maize, soy, oil palm, jatropha, wood, cassava, and some grains. Following the lead of our community partners and leading advocacy groups such as biofuelwatch, we prefer the term agrofuels to the commonly-used phrase "biofuels." Agrofuels are distinct from biofuels, which also include fuelwood and biomass used on a local and small-scale by communities and indigenous peoples around the world.

 

 

Posted By Colby Clabaugh at 10:21am on April 07, 2008

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