14 Apr
Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter just published a critical article about SEKAB by me and a group of Norwegian and Swedish researchers
Swedish aid to save environmentally harmful ethanol project
Dagens Nyheter, 14th April 2009.
http://www.dn.se/opinion/debatt/svenskt-bistand-ska-radda-miljofarligt-etanolprojekt-1.843272
Researchers reveal: The Swedish energy company Sekab is restarting its criticized project for ethanol production in Tanzania that can increase emissions of carbon dioxide. Sekab, which is owned by three municipal energy companies in northern Sweden, has renewed its plans to grow sugar cane for ethanol production in Tanzania in an area larger than the island of Gotland. Sekab has turned to aid agencies in Sweden and Norway to get money. The environmental impact assessment the company has been so embellished that the consultant which Sekab engaged to do the environmental study has distanced itself from the report. Small farmers would be driven away from their land. There is a clear risk that the sugar cane plantations will in fact contribute to increased emissions of carbon dioxide, write six researchers and a documentary filmmaker.
In February the Swedish energy company, Sekab, announced that it was abandoning its ambitions for large-scale ethanol production in Tanzania. Their original plan had been to grow 400,000 hectares of sugar cane plantations, a total area larger than the island of Gotland. But recently the company has been on the verge of bankruptcy when its owners in Sweden decided to end the flow of money rolling into the company in Tanzania. However Sekab is now trying to procure aid funds from Norway and Sweden in order to be able to continue its activities.
Sekab’s majority owners, the public energy companies in Örnsköldsvik, Skellefteå and Umeå, initially became involved in Sekab in order to commence ethanol production based upon use of forestry waste materials within their own municipalities. But gradually the company’s plans to produce ethanol from sugar cane plantations abroad in Tanzania became more prominent.
Meanwhile in Tanzania there is growing criticism against these Swedish investment plans. Why must Sekab gain control over such vast areas of the country? Sugar cane has been cultivated for many generations in Tanzania: why shouldn’t local farmers be able to supply the raw materials for biofuel from their own fields?
Sekab was supposed to have made public an environmental impact assessment report completed in December 2006 concerning its first project area in Tanzania. But for two years after that, researchers and students have not been allowed to see the report as it has been withheld by the company. In December 2008, the company finally submitted the report to the Tanzanian environmental agency, NEMC, which only then could begin to examine whether Sekab’s planned activities should be permitted in Tanzania. However, it now appears that Sekab made important changes in the text without the knowledge of Orgut, the consulting company originally responsible for the study. The original report had identified several serious environmental problems, for example, that water supply was insufficient, but these were problems were subsequently glossed over and played down in Sekab’s altered version of the report.
The fact that Sekab did not make the environmental impact assessment public has meant that the people of the affected areas have not been able to examine or consider the impacts of the project, nor have independent scientists been able to do so. However the text of the report was leaked, and therefore we know that the conclusions give a more favourable picture compared to the original consultancy study which had been carried out. This has been confirmed by the journal Development Today, which interviewed the project manager of Orgut. She asserted that Sekab “rewrote the conclusions in the best light: you get a different flavour”. Consequently, Orgut took a most unusual step for a consultancy company – they distanced themselves from altered version of the study. Orgut’s project manager concluded that the changes made by Sekab meant that “the procedure is not acceptable and it calls into question the independence of the study “.
Fifteen Tanzanian environmental researchers have recently published a 189-page report on biofuels in Tanzania. They call for a moratorium on industrial-scale biofuel projects until a framework is in place to assess what type of projects are of benefit to the country and what kind of projects are not acceptable.
Sekab’s huge efforts to produce ethanol in Tanzania now appear to have stalled. However in February, while Sekab announced publicly in Sweden that it would abandon the project, it simultaneously quietly took other initiatives to try to continue the project. In the last weeks they have attempted to obtain development aid support from Sida to continue their activities, or perhaps to make it more attractive for a new owner to take over operations. They are also talking with the Norwegian Embassy in Dar es Salaam along similar lines.
Advocates of large-scale biofuel projects argue that they can simultaneously fight poverty, promote carbon balance and improve the environment. However Sekab fails to convince in any of these three endeavours.
If Sekab were to commence plantation operations, it would result in many thousands of small-scale farmers losing their land. Their counter-argument is that the market economy will bring new opportunities. But experience shows that any such benefits tend to accrue to educated immigrants from other areas. In the case of Bagamoyo, where Sekab claims that they will merely take over an abandoned cattle ranch, the area is actually settled and used by both small-scale farmers and pastoralists who have been driven away from their original home areas by other agro-industrial investments in other parts of Tanzania. Thus, Sekab intends to produce “green energy” for the rich of the world, while poor Tanzanian smallholders and pastoralists will lose their livelihood basis.
In another project area in Rufiji, Sekab is negotiating with rural authorities in quest of even larger land areas. They make promises of a future with jobs, schools, health care and roads. One could label what is happening as “climate-colonialism” and “land-grabbing”.
Replacing fossil fuels with biofuels through the cultivation of new land does not automatically lead to a reduction of carbon dioxide release into the atmosphere. Studies of the savannah forests in Brazil show that conversion to sugar cane plantations causes a carbon deficit to the atmosphere that takes 17 years to balance. Will ethanol still be in demand after 17 years? If not, the sugar cane plantations will have contributed to increased emissions instead of reducing them. If biofuel should lead to real carbon savings, then one should focus on the use of crop residues and other wastes for biofuel production instead. Or one should cultivate poor quality land: in Tanzania one could investigate the re-utilisation of abandoned sisal plantations which still exist in parts of the country.
The initial Sekab project intended to grow sugar cane in monoculture in a sensitive coastal environment near Bagamoyo. Here there are endangered species of birds and at least 34 mammalian species on the IUCN “red list”. The project would consume all the water from the river Wami during some periods of the year. Sekab’s initial planned area in Bagamoyo covers 17,000 hectares whereas their next target is to grow to 400,000 hectares of sugar cane in the Rufiji area which would then require correspondingly greater quantities of the water.
In Tanzania, the initial enthusiasm for biofuels has been replaced by growing scepticism. The benefits initially seemed obvious: stagnant agriculture would receive an injection of modern technology and provide a new export product. Unused land would be put into service and produce new wealth. Local communities would be strengthened with new revenues. Infrastructure would be built to meet deliveries to and from factories. But then the questions started arising. Is the land that investors want really unused by local people? Is it so wise to refrain from growing food on land with good water supply, when food prices on world markets are rising? Is the international demand for ethanol really guaranteed in the medium and long term?
Sekab has taken steps to acquire land by making promises of future profits, and without having to pay anything substantial. When they now have trouble in getting Swedish financing for the project, it is an open question as to whom they might try to sell to. Waves of foreign acquisitions are taking large areas of land in Africa. The most salient example is the Korean company DAEWOO which has been acquiring one million hectares in Madagascar: this represents almost half of that country’s arable land. The deal was made with government officials before the people’s criticism forced the president out of office. Could Sekab’s land acquisitions in Tanzania affect political stability in Tanzania? A clear shift in the debate has occurred in the country: two years ago President Kikwete travelled around the district where Sekab intended to invest and he talked warmly of the many benefits it would bring. Today Tanzanian leaders are clearly careful about being linked to what is increasingly seen as neo-colonial occupation. Perhaps this is something to consider in Norway and Sweden while Sekab now hunts for aid funding for their sugar cane plantations.
Tor Arve Benjaminsen,
Professor of Development Studies, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norway
Ian Bryceson,
Professor of Environment and Development, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norway
Annika Dahlberg,
Lecturer in Geography, Stockholm University
Karin Holmgren,
Professor of Physical Geography, Stockholm University
Lars Johansson,
Documentary film maker, Maweni Farm, Tanzania
Mats Widgren,
Professor of Geography, Stockholm University
Download the article in English as PDF file
References for Sekab articles (coming soon):
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.
27 Mar
Mats Widgren at Uppsala University comments on a Swedish version of the Guardian article that I talked about yesterday, published in Swedish newspaper Göteborgsposten.
He says he doesn’t understand what the authors from the Swedish Environment Institute want:
They want biofuel investment in Tanzania that is good for the poor, good for the environment and good for the carbondioxide levels. Yes, wouldn’t it be fun if that could be arranged, but it is precisely the lack of consideration in all of these areas that SEKAB has been criticised for. What are the authors trying to say? (Swedish original: De vill ha en biobränslesatsning i Tanzania som är bra för de fattiga, bra för miljön och bra för koldioxidbalansen. Ja det vore väl kul om det gick att ordna, men det är ju just bristen på hänsyn på alla dessa kanter som gör att SEKAB har fått så mycket kritik. Något annat har väl inte kritikerna kritiserat? Vad är det egentligen skribenterna i GP vill ha sagt?)
Could we have an answer from SEI?
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.
