Muldoon: A Harbinger of Our Times

Jatropha: Another Man Made Disaster Looming

There are few left who remember the colossus that was Robert Muldoon, former Prime Minister of New Zealand. Faced with the "oil shocks" of the seventies, he committed vast sums of the public's money to Think Big projects. Think Big was all about borrowing and spending prodigious amounts to create energy alternatives out of nothing. Of course, almost every project was a failure and eventually was bankrupted or written off.

But the spending and the economic dislocation was real enough. It led eventually to the economic crisis of the eighties, where the New Zealand economy had become more state controlled than Eastern Bloc communist countries, wage and price controls had become a permanent fixture, and the entire country was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. The seeds of this calamity were sown in Think Big which led to huge, persistent, structural deficits and which eventually brought the country to its knees.

Energy crises may tend to bring forth mini-Muldoons. But when energy crises are married to global warming hysteria we see the emergence of maxi-Muldoons. The rule of thumb is that every economic project governments get involved in to produce alternative energy, clean energy, or assuage global warming ends up being both an exorbitant waste of people's money and dislocating to the economy. Everyone ends up poorer and weaker as a result.

Environment 360 has just given us another case study of the syndrome. Remember the jatropha bush, which has been hailed as the wonder shrub which will produce vast quantities of bio-diesel. Even Air New Zealand got sucked in, telling us that it was going to source aviation bio-diesel from jatropha bushes. It made a big PR test flight of one of its planes over Auckland to try to built green brand credibility. The plane was powered by biofuel--and we were told, the airline had plans to source biofuel from the miraculous jatropha bush.

Jatropha has been said to have significant advantages as a miracle biofuel:

The widespread publicity surrounding a seeming wonder-plant called Jatropha curcas began in earnest in the mid-2000s. A good-news story, it went like this: In the mildly toxic, oval-shaped, oily seeds of this hardy, shrubby tree was a near-miraculous source of biofuel. Since jatropha could grow on arid, barren lands, cultivating it would avoid displacing food crops such as corn and soybeans — a major drawback of so-called first generation biofuels. The world’s thirst for combustible fuels could be slaked, according to the buzz surrounding jatropha, with energy harvested from wastelands rather than from fertile fields.

So went the hype. Think Big swung into action.

Fast forward a couple of years. By 2009, governments from China to Brazil, along with several major biofuel companies, had planted — or vowed to plant — millions of acres of jatropha. In India alone, the government has announced plans to subsidize an intensive program to plant jatropha for biofuels on 27 million acres of “wastelands” — an area roughly the size of Switzerland. And the jatropha push is on in other countries such as Myanmar, Malaysia, Malawi, and Brazil. (Emphasis, ours)

What is the problem? Well, for a start it turns out that the ability of jatropha to grow in non-fertile soils has been grossly exaggerated. Thinking Big will do that to you. If it stays in non-fertile soils, its yield is, well, small. In order to get a decent, economic yield, it has to be planted in fertile soils, well irrigated and fertilised. In order to get the required quantity of bio-diesel vast swathes of fertile land have to be planted in the thing.

Enter the curse of land-substitution. Food is now being squeezed out by jatropha production, as land use goes away from food into jatropha.

Consider India’s great push to plant jatropha. According to the Indian environmental group, Navdanya, government foresters have drained rice paddies in order to plant jatropha in the poor and mostly tribal state of Chhattisgarh. As early as mid-2007, protests broke out in the mostly desert state of Rajasthan over a government scheme to reclassify village commons lands — widely used for grazing livestock — as “wastelands” targeted for biofuel production, primarily jatropha.

On Mindanao, the second-largest of the Philippine islands, protests erupted in late 2008, with indigenous leaders insisting that jatropha plantations had begun to displace needed crops of rice, corn, bananas, and root vegetables.

A striking symbol of jatropha’s pitfalls can be found in Myanmar, formerly Burma. Late in 2005, Myanmar’s military dictatorship — newly enamored with what’s been called “the biofuel tree ” — ordered all of that nation’s states and other political divisions to plant about a half-million acres each. In a predominantly agrarian country where child malnutrition is rampant, entire plantations have sprung up where food crops once grew.

Not that all is bad. On a micro-level (that is, when governments are not Thinking Big) it would appear that jatropha has some very real contributions to make.

It’s not all bad news. In the West African nation of Mali, on the southern edge of the Sahara, jatropha had long been grown as a sort of living fence to keep wildlife from crops, and sometimes as a source of handmade soap. In recent years, often with the help of nonprofit groups like the Denmark-based charity Folkecenter, local jatropha processing mills have appeared in hundreds of villages, providing fuel for lamps, cookstoves, and generators. The biofuel is not only cheaper than conventional oil and diesel, but it is available during rainy seasons, when impassable roads can block conventional fuel delivery. Even the solid “press cake” left over after the oil is squeezed out of the seeds has value as either an organic fertilizer or, if processed to neutralize the natural toxicity, animal feed.

Get the picture. When governments stay out and stop trying to save the planet, when they relinquish "Think Big", some great micro-solutions can emerge that are truly win-win for those concerned and bring economic and social progress for smaller communities.

"Think Big" jatropha is a disaster in the making--and the making is by politicians and voters wedded to the idea of the omni-competence of governments, and to opportunistic, unscrupulous capitalists who line their pockets on gargantuan government projects. It will all end in waste, failure, and tears.

One can almost hear the spectral cackle of our former Prime Minister who showed the world what can truly happen when government Thinks Big.