OUTSIDE his village in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, Sudarshan Dhrube inspects a field of jatropha, planted in rust-red soils, heavy with iron. His village is growing the shrub under the watchful eye of D1-BP Fuel Crops, a joint venture between D1 Oils, a British biofuels firm, and BP, an energy giant. D1-BP has promised to pay 6.50 rupees (14 cents) for every kilogram of the black seeds found inside the shrub’s fruit. Crushed, these seeds yield a viscous oil that burns with a clear, clean flame. The oil can run a generator or a pump. Or it can be refined into biodiesel that can fuel tractors, trucks or trains.
Jatropha contains a toxic protein similar to ricin. It was traditionally consigned to hedgerows, protecting more valuable, edible crops from peckish goats. The Shambaa tribesmen of Tanzania forced suspects to eat it. If they vomited, they were innocent. If they died, they weren’t.
Now the world is being asked to digest big claims for this poisonous plant. It will help meet the world’s demand for fuel, without crowding out the world’s supply of food. It will regenerate dry and denuded soils, and create jobs for impoverished farmers. India accounts for about two-thirds of the world’s jatropha plantations, according to New Energy Finance, a research firm, and a hefty share of the enthusiasm. India’s previous president planted it in his garden and Chhattisgarh’s chief minister runs his official car on its oil.
On September 12th the government followed up these gestures with a new national biofuel policy. By 2017 it aims to meet 20% of India’s diesel demand with fuel derived from plants rather than fossils. That will mean setting aside 14m hectares of land, according to the National Council of Applied Economic Research, a Delhi think-tank. By one count, jatropha now covers less than 500,000 hectares.
Biodiesel is not the only kind of biofuel: India also makes bioethanol from molasses left over from refining sugarcane. And jatropha oil is not the only source of biodiesel. The shrub has a more elegant rival in pongamia pinnata, or Indian birch, a silvery tree revered for its shady canopy and medicinal properties. Its crescent-shaped pods also contain seeds which can yield about 30% of their weight in oil, according to Roshini International Bio Energy, a firm based in Hyderabad. It has joined hands with the Andhra Pradesh government to plant the trees in three of Andhra Pradesh’s 23 districts. It is also venturing into neighbouring states and to Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Uganda. The goal, says Anil Reddy, Roshini’s founder, is “to plant 1 billion trees on this planet”, covering an area half the size of Denmark.
India’s enthusiasm for biofuel may seem odd only months after the country’s finance minister described conversion of food crops into biofuel as “a crime against humanity.” But D1-BP and Roshini point out that their favoured crops need not compete with food crops for land or water. Both are hardy plants that can grow on dry, stony soil. S.K. Kothari, Roshini’s technical director, says 150 acres of pongamia requires only as much water as a single acre of traditional crops.
But sceptics say these crops take too long to bear fruit and their yield is unreliable. Jatropha reaches full maturity in its fourth or fifth year; pongamia in its ninth. It is not easy to convince small farmers to devote care and attention to an untried crop which takes so long to provide a return. But without such care, especially in the crop’s infancy, the yield will disappoint, confirming the farmers’ doubts.
The answer lies in agronomy and sociology. Roshini has painstakingly accumulated a “gene bank” of high-yielding mother trees. Stems from these fecund plants can be grafted onto 200-300 saplings, which will then inherit the mother tree’s desirable properties, fruiting earlier and more reliably.
Breeding confidence and commitment in the farmers is, however, just as important. They require a lot of “handholding”, says Samiran Das of D1-BP. His firm has tried to generate a “community feeling” around its projects. For example, it has hired Dukhiya Yadav, the head of a village self-help group, to collect seeds from the farmers and sort the bad from the good, for half a rupee per kilogram. That gives her a stake in the farmers’ success.
Mr Dhrube, inspecting his jatropha field in Chhattisgarh, confesses some doubts about whether he will see a return this year. The leaves of the plants are drooping mournfully in the 42ºC heat. But an adviser from D1-BP assures him they will perk up when the sun goes down.
FOR years, anti-poverty campaigners railed against low commodity prices, which depressed farmers' incomes in developing countries. In recent months, the world price of virtually all staples has shot up, but the activists are still not cheering. They worry that this boom (intensified by “green” subsidies for biofuel crops) may worsen poverty even more than low agricultural prices did.
High food prices do help poor farmers, but they also hurt the more numerous category of people (poor city-dwellers as well as landless rural folk) who must buy food to survive. That “unintended consequence”—in the words of Gawain Kripke of Oxfam International, a British charity—has caused serious problems for the organisations that bring food aid to the poorest. The World Food Programme (WFP), a UN agency, has just issued an urgent appeal for $500m, to cover higher food costs. America's Agency for International Development (USAID), a huge financer of food aid, is asking for $350m.
The short-term outlook seems grim, both for the poor and the agencies that supposedly help them. Even before the current price boom started two years ago, food aid was running at historically low levels, perhaps half the real-terms total of two decades earlier. And the WFP says hunger is on the rise in the countries it watches. It classifies as “hotspots” the places—most of central Africa, plus Afghanistan—where more than a third of the people do not get as much food as is needed. A second tier, where between a fifth and a third lack adequate food, includes much of West Africa, the Indian sub-continent and Bolivia. David Kauck of CARE, an American charity, says that pockets of real hunger also exist in many rich countries.
Dismal as all this sounds, there are some grounds for hope. Today's woes may lead to fundamental changes for the better in the world's approach to hunger and food shortages. And not before time, in the view of experts who see something crazy about the way many food-aid efforts are now conceived and executed.
One mistake, arguably, is the very idea of defining the main problem as massive hunger, and hence the solution as providing food by any means necessary. “There is simply no shortage of food,” insists Rachel Nugent of America's Centre for Global Development. Of course, there are places—like North Korea or Darfur—where political (and in some cases ecological) factors cause an intense local shortage of food. In those cases, insists Josette Sheeran, head of the WFP, food aid is the only option. She also fears that the world is getting less resilient in its ability to respond to a growing number of food emergencies.
But leaving aside those extraordinary events, most pundits, including Ms Sheeran, agree that the world now has plenty of food: last year saw a record cereal harvest. And the investments spurred by today's high prices promise even more food in future. Even if one allows for rising demand from Asia's middle classes, the real challenge is not the volume of food available; it is the problem of food being in the wrong place and at a price the poorest cannot afford. Michael Hess of USAID adds that famines are made inevitable by poor governance, not natural disasters. After all, “America has droughts, but not famine.”
Moreover, hunger as such is the wrong target, says Meera Shekar of the World Bank. Hunger is transient and hard to measure, but malnutrition, she notes, is a pernicious killer (with lack of food as only one contributing variable). She points out that South Asia, which has plentiful food, suffers from twice the level of malnutrition as crisis-prone sub-Saharan Africa.
The snag is that tackling malnutrition is harder than sending bags of grain. It means fixing health systems, improving the delivery of nutrients in the food chain, educating people about hygiene and other unpopular and unprofitable jobs. Small wonder, then, that this burdensome task has fewer political cheerleaders.
Oxfam's Mr Kripke holds out hope that today's price shock may yet “help fix a broken system”. The United States, in particular, monetises food aid in a bizarre way. Tax dollars are used to buy food in America, which is then sold by charities in poor-country markets to fund development. Christopher Barrett, an economist at Cornell University, calls this “a clever way to turn a dollar of taxpayer money into 50 cents for a non-governmental organisation to spend.” The requirement that most food aid must be sent on American ships raises costs, and benefits just a few shippers.
Change may be coming. Over the objections of some tough lobbies, George Bush has proposed fixing some of the distorting aspects of America's food policies. The president has called for more emphasis on procuring produce from local farmers in poor countries. And in a bold gesture, CARE has said it will no longer accept any American government donations using the monetisation approach.
Most encouraging are some proposed changes at the WFP. Ms Sheeran hopes to persuade her board at a meeting in June to shift her agency's focus away from emergency food aid and towards a wider remit. She wants to expand its role in surveillance, stockpiling and risk-insurance. She also speaks of targeting subsidies or vouchers “in ways that complement markets rather than distort them”, as current subsidies often do. If this sort of clarity prevails, it would be a silver lining on the dark cloud that now looms over the poor.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has backed plans to redistribute voting power in the organisation.
It has recommended changes which would base the power of each of the IMF's 185 member countries on the size of their economy, reserves and trade.
The US has expressed reservations about the move but said that it would support it because it represented progress.
However poorer nations and charities have said the plans, which must still be ratified, do not go far enough.
IMF members have spent more than a year negotiating the changes - which would move some sway away from traditional industrial powers including the US, the UK and Germany - to the faster-growing emerging and developing economies.
China, India, South Korea, Mexico and Brazil are among those that will see their voting power increase.
However, under the proposal the likes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Russia, Iran and Argentina would lose influence and all five countries either voted against the plans or abstained from voting.
Final decisions will be made after the IMF's spring meeting next month.
"Today's agreement is a major step forward in the modernisation of the Fund and our efforts to adjust its structures to the dynamic and changing realities of the global economy, but it is only a first step," said IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
"We are creating a more flexible system for quota and voice, which involves further changes over time as the relative positions of countries in the world economy evolve."
The IMF said the proposed reforms feature simpler and more transparent formulae and some ad hoc quota increases to better represent more dynamic economies.
India's executive director to the IMF, Adarsh Kishore, said the move fell short of what it "had expected, hoped for and strived for".
Wajeha Huwaider talks of the injustice of the ban and calls for its abolition as she drives calmly along a highway.
She says the film was posted to mark International Women's Day. Thousands have viewed it on the YouTube website.
The last such public show of dissent was in 1990 when dozens of women were arrested for circling Riyadh in cars.
Last year, Ms Huwaider and other activists circulated a petition which was sent to King Abdullah urging him to lift the ban.
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But about halfway through, without comment, she executes a left turn onto the main highway and proceeds to drive along it in defiance of Saudi law.
"Many women in this society are able to drive cars, and many of our male relatives don't mind us driving," she says in Arabic.
"I hope that by next year's International Woman's Day, this ban on us will be lifted," she concludes.
In February, two leading Islamic scholars said there was no reason to continue the ban.
However, many conservatives continue to resist reform, arguing it would lead to mingling of the sexes which is banned under Saudi Arabia's strict interpretation of Islamic Law.
The 1990 protest, coming at the height of the Gulf crisis when US forces had come to defend Saudi Arabia, was followed by a crackdown on the women drivers and their passengers.
The women were jailed for one day, their passports confiscated, and many lost their jobs.
King Abdullah has in the past said that he thought a day would eventually come when Saudi women were allowed to drive.
The declaration of independence by Kosovo has provoked a worldwide debate about the merits of recognising it as a state.
Several governments with breakaway movements of their own are refusing to do so. They are anxious about setting a precedent and argue against recognition on the grounds that there was no agreement between Serbia and Kosovo and no clear UN Security Council mandate.
Others have endorsed the declaration as a unique and justified move for freedom and the inevitable outcome to Kosovo's history, in which Serb troops were forced out after Nato waged war in 1999 and the province was handed over to UN control.
The numbers matter. There needs to be a critical mass of countries recognising Kosovo to enable it to develop and prosper.
The United States, which made its own declaration of independence in 1776, and whose support for Kosovo has not been in doubt, led the way in recognising Kosovo. President Bush said: "The Kosovars are now independent."
The European Union
Several major European Union member states have also swung behind Kosovo, giving it powerful support. The EU as a whole has a key role in supervising the limited form of independence that a UN report recommended for Kosovo and which Kosovo has accepted.
Britain, France, Germany and Italy all see the Kosovo move as a one-off and as the last piece of the old Yugoslav jigsaw being slotted into its new place.
However, the EU, which has no common foreign policy except by agreement, is not unified. Cyprus, Romania and Slovakia are in the No camp. So is Spain, with its own separatist Basque movement.
Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said: "Spain is not going to recognise this unilateral declaration of independence... because it does not consider that this respects international law."
Russia
Beyond the EU, Russia is opposing independence, as it always has, again arguing that such a move should depend on there being an agreement with Serbia first.
"We are talking here of the disruption of all the basic fundamentals of international law in Europe, which is a result of years of suffering and wars and strife," said the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
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"It would undermine the basics of security in Europe... It would inevitably result in a chain reaction in many parts of the world, including Europe and elsewhere."
One question is whether Russia will now more actively support the demands of two regions of Georgia for secession.
South Ossetian leader Eduard Kokoyty said: "Both South Ossetia and Abkhazia have more political and legal grounds for their independence than Kosovo... we can clearly see a policy of double standards."
China
China indicated its opposition, perhaps with Taiwan in mind.
"China expresses its deep concern about Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence," the Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said.
Taiwan spoke in favour of Kosovo. "Our consistent position is that we want to develop relations with any free and democratic country," spokeswoman Phoebe Yeh said.
To which the Chinese spokesman replied: "It is known to all that Taiwan, as a part of China, has no right and qualification at all to make the so-called recognition."
Israel, with negotiations for a neighbouring state of Palestine ongoing, was cautious, refusing to give an immediate position. Israel itself declared its independence in 1948.
Precedent?
Regions with aspirations of independence of their own are using the Kosovo declaration as a potential precedent for them.
"I salute the independence of Kosovo. No people can be forced to live under the rule of another," said Mehmet Ali Talat, leader of the Turkish Cypriots.
Kosovo is "a lesson in how to resolve conflicts of identity and membership, peacefully and democratically," said Miren Askarate, spokeswoman for the Basque regional government in northern Spain.
The chairman of the breakaway Transdniester region of Moldova, Yevgeny Shevchuk, said: "We believe that a new era started and a new system of international relations was formed the moment part of a country, based on a series of historical developments, decided to live independently, and this country can gain recognition."