Biofuels in Africa: Investment Boon or Food Threat?

Africa’s vast arable lands have the potential to rival top agricultural nations like the United States in supplying biofuels to a world seeking cleaner energy sources.

But using land reserved for food production to supply biofuel demand could squeeze food supplies in a region vulnerable to shortages. It could also hurt poor consumers if the biofuel boom continues to push food prices higher.
As alternative energy takes off, Africans hope to cash in on the high prices of the commodities used to produce these fuels.

Already, investors have pledged billions of dollars for plants to produce bioethanol and biodiesel from crops like sugar, maize and soy in Africa.

Ernst Janovsky, head of agriculture at First National Bank in Johannesburg, said the high rainfall belt between Angola, Zambia and Mozambique alone had the potential to rival the United States as a producer of maize used in bioethanol.

“It’s almost as big as the size of the midwest of America. It has the same of type of potential and could actually outperform America,” he told Reuters.

As is so often the case in Africa, however, there is one major obstacle to this kind of investment — infrastructure. In Angola, for one, the land in question is covered by dense forest. Roads and manufacturing capacity have been wrecked by two decades of civil war.

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