Super plant or super problem?
admin September 10th, 2007
(Frances) It depends on our getting a grip …
A premise in Getting a Grip is that we humans actually create scarcity from nature’s abundance, and Sunday’s (9.9) New York Times carries a story focusing our minds on just this question: Will we use a plant with amazing potential to enhance abundance or to contribute or our planet’s decline? The West African country of Mali offers a rich example of the choices I’m getting at.
“Mali’s Farmers Discover a Weed’s Potential Power,” proclaims the headline—referring to jatropha (actually a small perennial shrub, not a weed). Many farmers in Mali have long planted it in every 7th row, right along with food crops, because it keeps plant-eating animals away and helps prevent soil erosion. It can grow in very poor soil and with little water.
Now, farmers are learning, it can also produce ten times more agrofuel per acre than corn. Turning jatropha into fuel, a local farmer could“double [his] income in the first year and lose none of his usual yield from his field.” Plus, the waste from the fuel’s processing is used as fertilizer.
Wow. What a boon to farmer, field and future. Using jatropha to enhance smallholder, diversified, sustainable farming—already shown to be many times more productive than industrial farming—is evidence of nature’s bounty as humans align with her.
Yet, at the very same time, with the very same crop, global capitalism’s scarcity-making logic is undermining nature’s logic. Following one rule, highest return to shareholder wealth, it turns nature’s genius on its head. The Indian government, with BP investment, is planning millions of acres of jatropha plantations, displacing small farmers.
Agrofuels are touted as an answer to climate change. But recently the magazine Seedling, warned: “Wide-scale cultivation of agrofuels will actually make [climate change] worse in many parts of the world.” It notes that in South-east Asia and the Amazon basin the drying of peat lands and the felling of tropical forest “will release far more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than will be saved by using agrofuels.
The lesson? In nature’s genius lie solutions to hunger and environmental collapse—but only if we allow it to be: only if we remake human-made economic laws to mimic nature’s laws—and include human beings, our thriving through empowerment, in the equation. Jatropha is an answer only if developed within the human ecology I call Living Democracy.
Frankie
