Eye on Mali: Jatropha Oil Lights Up Villages

[jpak]

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/006814.html

Some 700 communities in Mali have installed biodiesel generators powered by oil from the hardy Jatropha curcas plant to meet their energy needs, according to Reuters. The Malian government is promoting cultivation of the inedible oilseed bush, commonly used as a hedge or medicinal plant, to provide electricity for lighting homes, running water pumps and grain mills, and other critical uses. Mali hopes to eventually power all of the country’s 12,000 villages with affordable, renewable energy sources.

The landlocked West African nation, at the southern edge of the Sahara desert, is seeking to boost the standard of living of its 80-percent-rural population and to reduce migration from impoverished rural areas. “People have to have light, to have cool air, to be able to store vaccines, even to watch national television,” Aboubacar Samake, head of the jatropha program at the government-funded National Centre for Solar and Renewable Energy, told Reuters. “As things stand, a snake can bite someone in a village and they have to go to Bamako to get a vaccine.”

<snip>

Because jatropha can be grown on arid land, requires little care, and can help prevent erosion, it is more likely to complement than compete with food crops—a common concern with many biofuels. “They came to explain the project to us and said that if we grow jatropha it can produce oil to make the machine work,” said Daouda Doumbia, an elder in the Malian village of Simiji, which was recently outfitted with a biodiesel generator. “I grow groundnuts, and this activity can go alongside it as a partner crop,” he explained.

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[greenman3610]

1. this kind of rebuts the

"biofuels compete with food' argument, at least in this
arid area.
and since the western US might be headed in that
direction, climatically, could be an idea for the future here.

[Dogmudgeon]

3. The problem is the scale

Compare the energy demand of the people of the entire nation of Mali with the populace of just Los Angeles.

If all we needed were appliances, lights, and refrigerators, we would have no energy problems at all. But we also have automobiles, factories, public facilities and infrastructure. The USA alone maintains a huge military and is fighting a monstrously wasteful war.

And if we have to, we will starve the entire rest of the world to get the fuel we need to maintain our "lifestyle".

Biofuels DO compete with food. And as soon as there is a commodities market for jatropha oil, the people of Mali are screwed.

--p!

[silverweb]

2. We've got plenty of room for that.

Miles and miles of arid southwestern land. So how long will it take for someone to pick up the ball and DO something with this here?