The relationship between land grabbing for biofuels and food security, a bane or boon? The food security implications of jatropha biodiesel project in Northern Ghana

Boamah, Festus

The rapid emerging interest in large scale biofuel investments in Ghana are fraught with debates and controversies among government agencies, non-governmental organizations and policy makers expressing concerns about the possible effects on the environment, land tenure, food security and livelihoods. Due to the wide readership of reports against biofuels, most Ghanaian Governmental and Non-governmental Agencies have expressed doubts in biofuels on grounds of perceived dire consequences on land tenure, food security and local livelihoods and hence the urgent need to halt such developments in the country. The paper argues that, contrary to the extant literature that express dire consequences of biofuels for food security and livelihoods, a socially and environmentally responsible biofuel investments can rather contribute to increased food production, employment creation and income generation to complement agrarian and rural development in economically deprived rural areas. To provide a framework to re-think how global discourses are cascaded to the local and the consequent effects on household food security and livelihoods, the paper thus provides empirical evidence depicting that, the relationship between biofuels and food could be either baneful or beneficial for particular local communities depending on specific contexts.

Event: International Conference on Global Land Grabbing

Document type:The relationship between land grabbing for biofuels and food security, a bane or boon? The food security implications of jatropha biodiesel project in Northern Ghana (208 kB - pdf)