05 Apr
What do you do first when you get a thick technical EIA report in your hand? I flick through the summary to the conclusions chapter where I expect to find something like a verdict. In the case of SEKAB’s draft EIA report I am met by this all-important little paragraph that could well be the only part of the report that a busy and not so technically conversant policy maker or journalist reads:
“Although there are some limited negative environmental implications of the project, the project will have significant socio-economic and environmental benefits to the people of communities surrounding the project, Bagamoyo District and the Nation. The associated negative impacts, to a large extent have been minimized through good project design and envisaged farm operation practices. ”
This is from the incomplete draft version of the EIA report that Bryceson et al criticizes. The draft, dated July 2008, is available for download at the website of Swedish Radio programme Klotet. Development Today revealed last week that the conclusions quoted above were written by SEKAB. The company changed the consultants’ report while leaving their name and signatures on it.
But this is not the version that Orgut did not sign for. Orgut team leader Melinda Fones-Sundell says to Development Today that Orgut accepted the changes in July:
Fones-Sundell justifies this, saying that the detailed baseline studies contained Orgut’s main observations, which would be available for NEMC to see.
So the fact that the general conclusions is a greenwash by SEKAB was not a problem for Orgut, since the NEMC experts will draw their own conclusions anyhow.
Then what is the purpose of including conclusions at all? The phrase “some limited negative environmental implications” is pure nonsense (what would unlimited implications be like?) and serves only to deceive readers who are looking for what all the data in the report means.
But then again we don’t even get to see the full report since SEKAB has not released it. It has only been submitted to NEMC, the government authority responsible for approving it. According to a comment by Geir Sundet to my previous post NEMC has a backlog of EIAs that could take years to clear, which could mean that the report can be kept away from the public during the period when all the important decisions are made by investors and government authorities. Should someone ask for it SEKAB can say that it is stuck in government bureaucracy but that it showed “some limited” negative effects and “significant benefits” to communities, district and nation.
In actual fact the study shows serious risks, most importanly that there isn’t enough water in the Wami River.
It is the final version of the report, the one that was submitted to NEMC, that Orgut now disowns since SEKAB continued to tinker with it between July and December without seeking the consultant’s approval.
Earlier this month, in connection with questions raised by Development Today, Orgut was surprised to receive this final EIA report from SEKAB, dated December 2008. The report bears Orgut’s name with Melinda Fones- Sundell’s signature. Yet she tells DT she had never seen this report before. In a mail in late March, Renman informed Orgut that its report contained “many incorrect statements” and had an unacceptable standard. DT asked Renman what SEKAB’s main points of criticism are, but he declined to elaborate.
Orgut’s report was submitted to SEKAB in May 2008. Why did SEKAB wait until March 2009 to inform Orgut that the report was of “unacceptable standard”?
SEKAB and their cheerleaders seem to suggest that although large scale industrial biofuel production is risky in this environment, this is a company that is so honest, transparent, open and committed to “humble learning” (Arvidsson in The Guardian) that they deserve to be given land areas the size of small countries for 99 years. For free.
But SEKAB is anything but transparent and open. They tinkered with the EIA and keep it away from both the public and the consultants who made the studies. They don’t tell exactly which areas they are after in Rufiji. The criteria used in their certification system turned out to be secret when Swedwatch asked to see them. They met with Sida but won’t say what they talked about. In Sweden they didn’t submit their tax returns last year and took a penalty to conceal their losses while negotiating with secret potential buyers.
SEKAB can do the talk but not the walk. Behind the rhetoric about sustainability they behave much like the other land grabbing business ventures in Africa.
Another lesson from this strange story is: Don’t read the conclusions in the summary of EIAs. Draw your own.
02 Apr
Damning news on SEKAB from development-today.com:
SEKAB has made changes in the environmental study of the Bagamoyo biofuel plantation project in Tanzania without consulting the Swedish firm Orgut that wrote the original report. SEKAB submitted the report to Tanzanian authorities last December with Orgut’s name on it. Orgut now disowns the SEKAB report.
So this is why the EIA report, which was ready ages ago, was never released!
Credit to Orgut for revealing this. Does this mean that the consultants don’t stand by the conclusions in the incomplete leaked version of the report that we have seen? Can they now let us see the original?
How can EIAs not be public, by the way? What’s the point with making them if citizens aren’t supposed to read them?
01 Apr
Tanzanian daily The Citizen (pdf) picked up the news about Sekab meeting with Sida in Stockholm and called the new CEO Björn Edström in Örnsköldsvik. He said Sekab had seen the Development Today report but that “there is no truth in it”. Edström says Sekab is NOT going to “apply for any assistance in the form of loans or gurantees”.
So the meeting at Sida in Stockholm was about something else, apparently related to Sekab’s secret negotiations with secret investors who are interested in buying the Tanzanian company, asking for Sida to help with “preparing the ground” for a deal, Edström hinted.
What could that mean?
Are Sekab asking Sida to guarantee loans to a new owner? Why would Sida want to do that?
In other Sida-related biofuel news, Development Today report:
A major new study funded by Sida and written by academics from three Tanzanian universities points to the far-reaching impacts of large-scale biofuel plantations in Tanzania. The report warns of land grabbing by foreign investors and water shortages, and calls for a moratorium on biofuel projects until a new legal and policy framework is in place.
26 Mar
Brief background: Sekab is a Swedish company seeking a 99-year land lease to large areas in Tanzania for producing sugercane fuel ethanol for export. The project is controversial in both Tanzania and Sweden, for different reasons. The local councils that own Sekab have instructed the company to sell or wind up it’s activities in Africa. Sekab is now looking for buyers.
I have tried to follow the news about Sekab in both countries for a while and I have noticed a disconnect between how news about Sekab are reported in Sweden and Tanzania.
A report by Sida-funded Swedwatch criticised Sekab’s sustainability criteria and verification system but got little press in Tanzania as it hasn’t been translated from Swedish yet.
Likewise, Swedish media did not follow Tanzanian debates questioning the plantation economy as a path to progress until the radio programme “Klotet” was tipped about a critical article by Ian Bryceson and a group of prominent Tanzanian academics. The professors said Sekab in Tanzania represented Sida-backed Swedish neocolonialism.
“Swedish Neocolonialism” is quite some headline.
Recently Sekab’s main owners — three local municipal councils in Northern Sweden who originally thought Sekab was all about producing cellulosic ethanol from local wood – instructed the company to sell or wind up all assets in Africa. Or so they said in a press release (pdf) that was available only in Swedish. It took many days for baffled journalists and other interested parties in Tanzania to find out what had actually been decided since Sekab’s activities in Dar continued as if nothing had happened.
Yesterday Development Today revealed that Sekab has asked Sida to invest SEK 100 million in their project in Tanzania. Today a local newspaper interviewed Björn Edström, the new CEO of Sekab (Carstedt resigned as CEO but remain chairman of the board, has that been reported in Tanzania?). Edström qualified this information by saying that they are not actually asking Sida to fund Sekab directly, but to somehow commit funds to the project for the future in order to facilitate a deal with a new investor, because: “We don’t want to lose money if it can be avoided” (Swedish: Vi vill inte förlora pengar i onödan). While this may comfort angry local readers whose local tax money are now at stake in a high-risk adventure far away in Africa, it sounds rather ominous for those of us who still believe that Sida should fund things of benefit to poor people rather than bailouts of Swedish companies in trouble.
Yesterday also, the Guardian in Tanzania had an article by Anders Arvidson from the Swedish Environment Institute (SEI). SEI has received funding from Sida in the order of SEK 20 million for a research project on Climate and Development. The author is apparently based at Dar es Salaam University.
Arvidson says his article is in response to “several articles in the Tanzanian, Swedish and Norwegian media accusing the companies (…) of being neocolonialist and out to rob Tanzania of its natural resources”.
I don’t know about Tanzania and Norway, but I haven’t seen any recent news articles in Swedish media that accuses any biofuel companies for neocolonialism. A Google search for Swedish language articles mentioning “Sekab” and “nykolonialism” or “neocolonialism” returns very few items that all refer to that one radio programme, which in turn was merely quoting Bryceson et al. A Google News search for Sekab, on the other hand, returns page after page of articles about the company’s economic difficulties mixed with positive stories of praise and awards to Sekab for their ambition to develop sustainability criteria. There’s nothing about robbing Tanzania as far as I can see. I therefore assume that Arvidson had mainly the Tanzanian professors’ article in mind when he wrote that “We believe that many of these [critical] statements are poorly founded, unconstructive and often remarkably one-sided”.
He continues with what to me looks like a remarkably one-sided defense of the biofuel industry. I find his almost breathless THERE ARE NO ALTERNATIVES enthusiasm for the potential of the biofuel industry to transform the Tanzanian economy provocative. I would have expected Sida-funded researchers to focus on how to make biofuels work for the poor, and to stay away from writing blatantly pro-industry opinion pieces for Tanzanian newspapers. The Tanzanian academics’ critique of Sekab’s project may be one-sided but it is certainly not “poorly founded”. It is based on facts about specific circumstances and locations. They are concerned that Sekab will clear forest in an area designated as one of the world’s 34 biodiversity hotspots (link), push people off the land and use vast amounts of water, fertiliser and chemicals for a kind of mechanised and very intensive monoculture farming, which by no means has been proven sustainable in this environment, regardless of what Sekab’s bullet-point list of sustainability criteria says. Arvidson does not respond to specific arguments and objections. Instead he holds up a visionary perfect-world scenario where the rural poor will become happy shareholders in a biofuel industry that even manages to produce enough food for everybody on top of rich monetary rewards. He says that this is the only way that Tanzania can rise from poverty. He sees the big picture. But the devil is in the details.
Everybody involved in this debate agrees that biofuels have great potential in Tanzania. Nobody would object to investing in small-scale biofuel production on marginal lands owned by local farmers. We all agree that much more research, technology development and investment is warranted. Even large-scale industrial plantations driven by foreign investment would be more than welcome as far as I am concerned — if the industry really did what it said it would do and established rainfed crops on unproductive lands that are not important for biodiversity conservation or carbon sequestration. And if they can’t find such land (because there isn’t any that would sustain sugercane), they could start by partnering with one of the existing big sugercane plantations in Tanzania for a trial. Or, chosing a less demanding crop, why not convert an old sisal estate to biofuel production?
And how about growing food instead? Tanzania imports lots of rice today and there is a scramble for land to grow food for Asian and Middle East market. What are Arvidson’s thoughts on foreign companies buying up what remains of arable land in Africa for large-scale food production? Korean company Daewoo had closed a deal with Madagascar to lease half of that nation’s arable land. Public resent triggered a coup and the new regime immediately cancelled the Daewoo contract. Reuters headline was: Daewoo finds African land is a risky business. Investors and politicians were warned. Museveni just prohibited the allocation of “large chunks of land” to foreign companies: “With high food prices around the world (which is an opportunity for us) some countries that do not have agricultural land want to buy the land of ‘sleepy Africans”, he stated.
Neocolonialism. I can understand that someone who sincerely believes that foreign investment in land is necessary to drive development doesn’t like the word. But from a Tanzanian perspective an economy based on plantations owned by foreign companies resembles the bad old days, and sugercane growing and distilling isn’t exactly rocket science either. There are millions of hectares of active, overgrown or encroached plantations in East Africa already and millions of descendants of the manamba farm workers who toiled on them. I guess there were great plans and big visions (the groundnut scheme). But there’s very little economic and social development to show for it.
