In the remote interior of Congo, the news was buzzing around the villages: a Canadian company needed workers for a seed farm to produce jatropha plants, a new biofuel for global markets.
The company asked for 20 workers to arrive at 7:30 on a Wednesday morning. “You wouldn’t believe it – there were 800 people who showed up, some of them a few days before, and they slept on the road,” says Louis Tourillon, founder and CEO of Carbon2Green, a Montreal-based company.
“Those people need the work. They need what we’re bringing there. And without climate change, we wouldn’t be there doing that. The potential impact of what we’re doing is just mind-boggling.”
Africa has long been known as the biggest victim of climate change: the region of the world most vulnerable to the droughts and floods that are expected to increase in the coming decades. It’s a serious threat: water scarcity alone could affect 250 million Africans by 2025. But some entrepreneurs and financiers believe that Africa can also benefit from the economic opportunities of climate change. They hold a radically different vision of the climate trends, seeing the chance for jobs and development, instead of just doom and gloom.
Any program for the Congo Basin will have to demonstrate that the forest is worth more alive than dead. — Former Canadian prime minister Paul Martin, co-chairman of a fund to preserve the Congo forest
As the world adapts to climate change, it will need carbon sinks – such as the vast rain forests of Congo – to absorb the rising emissions from fossil fuels. And it will need cleaner sources of energy: renewable alternatives such as wind power, geothermal, biofuels, hydroelectricity and solar power. All of these resources can be found in abundance in Africa.
Mr. Tourillon’s company, for example, would employ 180 full-time workers at its Congo operations, where it plans to grow 35 million jatropha plants on 14,000 hectares of land. Another 3,000 farmers would get indirect jobs by harvesting the jatropha and selling it to the company.
Carbon2Green's mission is to establish activities in developing countries certified as CDM projects that will reduce the emission of greenhouse gases and therefore result in the issuance of carbon credits by the competent authorities.
The project could be a boon for an impoverished region of Africa where unemployment is about 60 per cent and average wages are about 35 cents a day. The company says it will spend $2-million annually to buy jatropha seeds from the 3,000 farmers, while the full-time employees would get $500 to $2,000 a month.
The seeds of the jatropha plant can be converted into oil that can fuel generators and produce electricity. “This is not new, but we’d be the first to do it in Congo on this scale,” Mr. Tourillon said in an interview. “We’ve put together a business model where everyone makes money.”
Traditional fossil fuels, primarily diesel for power generators, are currently providing 80 per cent of Africa’s energy, he said. “There’s a business opportunity to replace that 80 per cent. The market could be huge. The market is already there – they are buying fuel – so you don’t need to create a new market.”
Biofuels are a controversial industry in Africa. The potential is certainly enormous. Europe and the United States have passed laws to encourage the use of ethanol to replace fossil fuels, and entrepreneurs are taking advantage by creating sugar-cane plantations in countries such as Sierra Leone to produce ethanol for export to Europe. But critics worry that the plantations will encourage “land grabs” that could push thousands of ordinary Africans off the land.
Jatropha is equally controversial. It was once hailed as a “miracle plant” that would grow on marginal land, providing a higher income for impoverished farmers. Foreign investors, including huge corporations, jumped into the industry. But some environmentalists are now criticizing the jatropha boom, saying it has actually increased poverty in some regions where the jatropha crops were not commercially viable, consumed too much water and required better soil than originally thought.
