Common Fund for Commodities to invest in sisal-to-biofuel project in Tanzania

In Tanzania, the Common Fund for Commodities said that it will invest $100 million over five years to develop added-value strategies for African farmers, including a project in the eastern province of Tanga to create sisal residue to biofuel. Sisal, used to make rope, will use biofuel to power a 150 MW in electricity.

Tanzania background

Sun Biofuels is acquiring 17,000 acres for jatropha cultivation and will expand capacity to 85,000 acres in the long-term. The company said it will pay workers $1095 per year for farming and harvesting and would devote an additional five percent of its budget towards “social infrastructure”. Observers said that Tanzania uses less than 6 percent of suitable agriculture farmland and has more than 170 million acres available for cultivation.

The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has released a decision-support tool to assist countries in planning their entry into biofuels production. The analytical framework allows government to assess biomass potential; biomass production costs; the economic bioenergy potential; macro-economic consequences; national and household-level impact and consequences on food security. The tool will be tested in Peru, Thailand and Tanzania, before it is is made available to the international community at large.

Eleven African nations agreed at an FAO meeting in Rome to improve cooperation aimed at ending rural poverty. The agreement targeted the exchange of scientific information and the establishment of rural training relating to biofuels and climate change. have agreed to join forces to meet the challenge of education for rural people. Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Guinea, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Niger, Uganda, Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania adopted a series of recommendations for African governments, international agencies and higher learning institutions.

African countries are increasingly attempting to coordinate biofuels policy. Recently, in Burkina Faso, officials of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) completed three days of meetings that coordinated biofuels policy prior to the commencement of the 13th UN Conference on Climate Change which will be held in Bali next week.

African ministers have pushed for the inclusion of Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) credit for nations that institute sustainable forest management practices. The credit would produce earnings of up to $119 per rural household.

African analysts estimate that conserving biodiversity and carbon through forest management has to take into account “degradation” (removing valuable timber without proper post-logging care) as well as outright deforestation, for the policy to have success in Africa.

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