DR Congo debates its enormous biofuels potential.

[JohnWxy]

http://news.mongabay.com/bioenergy/2008/06/dr-congo-debates-its-enormous-biofuels.html




The Democratic Republic of Congo is debating the pros and cons of its enormous untapped agricultural potential, in particular for the production of biofuels, while in Rome the international community is discussing the food crisis. Surprisingly, the country's stakeholders are rather optimistic about what biofuels can do for Congo's development.

The DRC, a country the size of Western Europe, is a nation full of contradictions: on the one hand its 56 million inhabitants face the highest malnutrition level in the world, with over 70 per cent of the population being badly nourished or living in hunger; on the other hand, the DRC has one of the largest capacities to grow agricultural products, with tens of millions of hectares of unused land on which highly productive crops can be grown. On the one hand, Congo imports most of its food from the EU, Latin America and Asia, while on the other nearly 50 per cent of its own population are farmers making less than half a dollar a day.

According to agricultural experts, the DRC alone has the agro-ecological capacity to grow food for 2 to 3 billion people. It currently uses less than 5 per cent of its potential arable land. With investments in modern agriculture, the country could thus feed all the new people that will be born between today and 2050 (when the planet will have a population of around 9 billion). The FAO says a very large portion of this potential is highly suitable for the production of sustainable energy crops

~~
~~
Locally produced biofuels can turn this catastrophic situation around, said Alain Rousseaux, coordinator of the Dutch Development Organisation which attended the meeting. Farming communities, who face not the slightest shortage of land, can grow their own fuel, thus limit their food production costs and bring the products to market at a far lower cost than if they were to rely on ultra-costly diesel and gasoline. Likewise, the expensive fossil energy required to process food would be replaced by far less costly biofuels and bioenergy:

Assuming oil prices stay high, biofuels could also lower the threat of inflation, as fuel is used in all productive sectors of the economy, driving up prices of all products and services. By providing cheaper fuels - and Congo has the agro-ecological potential for the most efficient energy crops - all sectors of the economy would benefit.

~~
~~

On the level of the state, biofuels offer many benefits as well. Congo is one of the countryies who, according to the UN, are experiencing the following disastrous situation:

Recent oil price increases have had devastating effects on many of the world's poor countries, some of which now spend as much as six times as much on fuel as they do on health. Others spend twice the money on fuel as they do on poverty alleviation. And in still others, the foreign exchange drain from higher oil prices is five times the gain from recent debt relief.


http://news.mongabay.com/bioenergy/2008/01/uns-fao-bright-future-for-sustainable.html">UN's FAO: Bright Future for sustainable biofuels DR Congo



The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation now says that, indeed, Congo is one of Africa's most promising biofuels producers due to its vast amount of farmland suited to a range of crops from palm oil to soybeans, from sugarcane to grasses. Better still, the fuels and bioenergy can be produced in a sustainable way, it says, without threatening the DRC's unique rainforests - so large is the non-forest land base.

Dr. Josef Schmidhuber, senior economist at the FAO, told Reuters the DRC had 80-115 million hectares of unused arable land, 4 million of which could be irrigated. All of the land in question is non-forest land. Congo currently utilizes less than 5 percent of all this potential arable land.

[excess_3]

1. the DR Congo gov't likes the idea of importing food and fuel

imports are tax and bribe friendly

[Braulio]

2. I remember the Congo

It's one of the most godawful places I've ever visited, and I've seen plenty. What impressed me most was the public hospital, it was a real nightmare. The best part was eating lobster on the beach, and the African drummers, they're much better than those pansies one sees at the tourist spots in Kenya.

[NNadir]

3. An interesting place, although - truth be told - there is "probably" only one DUer who

has been to Africa. How do I know? He told us all, "I'm probably the only one who's been to Africa." (The topic was the enormous world wide annual death rate from burning, um, biofuels indoors, roughly a million per year, give or take a few hundred thousand.)

One of the fun things about Africa besides the agony it goes through to support Western renewables portofolio standards - whether it involves sugarcane plantations for ethanol cars or coal mines in South Africa to support the German "nuclear phase out" - is how much Africa suffers for Western bourgeois conceits.

One of the most tragic things in the Congo involves coltan (Columbium/Tantalum ore - Columbium is a historical word for niobium). The entire portable cell phone industry wouldn't exist without Tantalum which is used to make super capacitors. I have actually listened to car CULTists here wax romantic about super capacitor cars.

If one gives a rat's ass - and more often it is convenient to not give a rat's ass - coltan tales would make one's hair stand on end.

[poopfuel]

4. That's burning biomass, not biofuels

If one gives a rat's ass, one would do a little research and learn how ethanol is the best fuel for indoor cooking.
projectgaia.com

Have fun learning!

[NNadir]

6. I think in my post above, I made fun of your silly distinction my noting the urinary

cancer rates of sugarcane workers.

There is NOT ONE 'biofules will save us" advocate who understands the full life cycle involved and thus NOT ONE is engaging in anything other than selective attention.

[jpak]

5. French uranium mining companies have been ruthlessly exploiting African nations for years

if anyone gives a rat's ass

which they don't

[NNadir]

7. Really? Which country in Africa has lost 3.8 million people to uranium mining

comparable to the 3.8 million deaths in DRC for coltan mining since 1998, fundie boy?

Care to provide some references or is just like the rest of your dogmatic chants, where in uranium requires special and arbitrary attention and your pals in the coal industry and the electronics industry can kill at will, just bullshit, JPak says drivel.

Here's info on coltan mining in DRC http://www.wrm.org.uy/bulletin/69/Congo.html

How about a row of insipid gigglys?

Nuclear energy need not be perfect to be vastly superior to all the stuff you don't care about Giggly Fundie Boy. It merely needs to be better than everything else.

Going on and on and on and on with selective attention to 1950's practices and claims - including the 1950's claim that solar energy could support your useless bourgeois consumer lifestyle - has little relevance to modern practice. To wit, it is now well understood that enough thorium has already been mined in the United States (and discarded by US television manufacturers) to fuel the United States for thousands of years with out trashing a single desert, ocean, or land mass.

[kristopher]

8. You have a remarkable affinity for perverted logic...

You attribute the deaths of people involved in African conflicts to the resource they sell to fund their conflict?

Using a similar line of reasoning we can predict that you accept that nuclear power is the cause of the Cold War and all lives lost fighting the proxy wars of that era, right?

Nuclear power is inextricably related to nuclear weapons proliferation.
The possession of nuclear weapons by any one power is an intolerable security situation for all other nations, leading to either en mass adoption of nuclear weapons or the implementation of an alternative strategy to deal with the threat.
The alternative arrived at was to concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) where a bipolar political landscape formed around the two nuclear superpowers and the nuclear umbrella they offered their allies.
As a result of the integration of tensions from all the allies into the fabric of relations between the two superpowers, and as a consequence of the MAD Doctrine - when tensions escalated proxy wars such as those fought in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and any number of other hot spots were the alternative.

Therefore all the deaths related to those wars are directly attributable to nuclear power.

Pretty stupid logic, eh?

[Dogmudgeon]

9. "Nuclear power is inextricably related to nuclear weapons proliferation."

Also, to nuclear medicine.

The last time I checked, it's saved a life or two.

--d!

[kristopher]

10. You can have nuclear medicine without widespread nuclear power or weapons.

When a nation wants nuclear weapons the route is through nuclear power, not nuclear medicine.

Try to find a tally of total fatalities in all proxy wars and see where you end up. We can start with attributing the 3.2 million in DR Congo to that neglect in developing Africa that resulted from the misallocation of resources during and since the Cold War.

[jpak]

11. what a stupid post

:rofl: