Biofuel crop may not justify hopes

While one can hope that jatropha’s apparently miraculous ability to grow without water or fertiliser on degraded land will help to alleviate the oil import burdens of the world’s poorest countries, reason suggests that grave disappointment is the more likely outcome. The main proponents of its cultivation are entrepreneurs who, quite understandably, seek to maximise the yield of biodiesel from wherever they plant it.

They will not seek out genuinely arid degraded land for the simple reason that it is hard to establish jatropha without initial substantial irrigation, and harder to optimise the yield of crude jatropha oil without reasonably fertile soil. This suggests its cultivation will in practice encroach upon land that is perfectly suitable for food production, or else its yield will be so poor as to render it uneconomic as a source of biodiesel.
Being highly toxic, jatropha has no alternative use as a food crop if the economics do prove unattractive, unlike palm, soy, wheat or maize. It also runs the “buggy whip” risk that, as a first-generation biofuel crop, it will soon be made redundant by the development of second-generation biofuels derived from wood chips, straw, miscanthus and vegetal matter. This would be a tragedy for poor farmers bewitched by its apparent cash appeal.

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