The social cost of the EU’s renewable energy policy

The NGO ActionAid has brought to light the potential negative effects on developing nations of the EU’s renewable energy policy.

Its report, ‘Fuelling Evictions: Community Cost of EU Biofuels,’ documents how 20,000 people in Kenya’s Dakatcha woodland are facing eviction from land where an EU company plans to grow jatropha to manufacture biofuels.

Fifty kilometres from the town of Malindi, the woodland has been held in trust by Malindi County Council on behalf of the communities living on the land. In 2008, Kenya’s Company Jatropha Energy Ltd (KJE), a subsidiary of the Italian Company, Nuove Inziative Industriali, applied to the Malindi County Council to lease 50,000 hectares of land for 33 years, according to ActionAid’s Kenyan representative, David Barisa, who was in Brussels at the beginning of May to lobby EU institutions.

He says that KJE’s promises of infrastructure, schools, hospitals and work for Dakatcha’s inhabitants remain … just promises.  

The rush by EU companies and others to find land on which to grow biofuels has been driven in part by the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive (RED) of 2009 which states that 20 per cent of the EU’s energy consumption must come from renewable energy sources by 2020 and that 10 per cent of transport fuel must come from renewable sources by the same date.  Another issue which allows such biofuels projects to go ahead without full consideration of the social consequences is the lack of security of land tenure in some developing nations. About 75 per cent of the land on Kenya’s coastal area is owned by local councils and can be leased, although a new law promulgated by Kenya’s Parliament in August 2010 established a Land Tenure Board which stipulates that the communities on council lands must also be shareholders in economic ventures.    

Civil society protests

It remains to be seen whether this new legislation will be applied to Dakatcha. Following civil society protests in July 2010, Kenya’s National Environmental Management Authority asked KJE to undertake a pilot project to prove the environmental sustainability of jatropha development in the woodland. The company has since re-submitted plans to start a pilot project using 10,000 hectares of land.

“If the plantation goes ahead, the community will effectively be evicted from the land where they have lived for generations in small villages or clusters of huts. They grow food crops such as cassava maize and pineapples on small fields outside the woodland area to feed their families and sell at the local market”, reads ActionAid’s report. Dakatcha’s communities also depend on the woodland for beekeeping and herbal medicine. It is also a source of drinking water, poles for construction and firewood and provides revenue from eco-tourism.

ActionAid’s Chris Coxon draws attention to what he sees as a lack of coherence between the EU’s renewable energy policy and the development target of poverty alleviation. In the ActionAid report he states  “We call on the European Union to respect its legal obligations to ensure policy coherence for development under the Lisbon Treaty and scrap current [renewables] policies, including targets and financial incentives, which promote unsustainable biofuels at the expense of land and food rights in communities such as the Dakatcha Woodlands”.   

Hegel Goutier