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ATTENTION in recent days has been focused on the
systematic suppression of information flow in
Burma
(Myanmar to its junta leaders) as a factor in the
regime’s abject failure to prepare its people for the
onslaught of Cyclone Nargis, despite adequate warnings
from Indian meteoreologists, thus resulting in the huge
death toll and property and crop losses.
However,
that kind of opacity is not limited to weather warnings;
the junta’s brand of governance is really so averse to
transparency and inclusivity that hapless citizens never
really have any clear idea where their leaders are
steering the country, economic- or politics-wise.
The
assessment after the horrendous impact of Nargis has
brought to the fore one such policy shift that, if
independent researchers are to be believed, had been a
factor in the Burmese people’s current miseries.
According to experts interviewed for a special report by
the Wall Street Journal, the junta had jumped into the
biofuels bandwagon a few years ago, along with the rest
of the region, in a bid to reduce dependence on the
costly imported oil. Nothing wrong with that, we’re all
in that direction. But while there are genuine, serious
debates in Asian democracies about how much land and
what areas to devote to biofuels, and what criteria to
apply in striking the balance between biofuels and food
security, that kind of debate is nonexistent in Burma,
where policy is routinely kept a closely guarded secret.
Thus it
came to pass, says the WSJ report, that in December
2005, Senior Gen. Than Shwe launched a nationwide
campaign to grow jatropha, that hardy bush whose fruit
yields a liquid convertible to fuel. At about the same
time, Philippine leaders in and out of government also
screamed Jatropha! Jatropha! as if it were the silver
bullet in a range of biofuel options. When India, China
and the rest of Southeast Asia were doing it, who can
blame the junta, therefore, for going gaga over the
shrub? Here’s the rub, so to speak, in the Burmese
shrub. Per the WSJ report, although jatropha’s champions
had advised governments that it’s a good biofuel option
because jatropha is a hardy plant that grows even in the
ugliest terrain, Burma wasted big chunks of its “most
fertile land” by having these converted to jatropha
plantations, with some plots reaching as much as 1,000
hectares each. The report quoted Prof. Monique Skidmore
of the
Australian
National
University,
author of two books on Burma, as being prompted to say:
“This was the whitest of the junta’s white elephants.”
To be fair, no exact amount is available right now of
how much fertile land was devoted to jatropha. But the
ambitious goal of Gen. Than Shwe gives an idea: his
goal, says the WSJ report, was to grow jatropha in a
total area the size of Belgium—30.5 million square
kilometers, or 3 million hectares.
“A
report this month by the Ethnic Community Development
Forum, an alliance of seven nongovernment organizations,
cataloged instances where the military seized private
farmland to grow jatropha or ordered farmers to switch
to the oil from rice or other crops,” said the WSJ.
Worse, one reported order to each of the 14
administrative zones betrayed the irrationality in
decision-making: Each zone was arbitrarily told to plant
200,000 hectares of jatropha, regardless of that
region’s size or the extent of its land that is fit for
jatropha; meaning, if a region had predominantly fertile
land good for rice or other food crops, it still must
set aside that huge plot of land for jatropha.
Not
surprisingly, the jatropha campaign is faltering,
despite the huge swaths of land devoted to the scrub.
Because the leaders simply gave orders and didn’t bother
to explain, many farmers, so goes the report, didn’t
know what sort of strange plant they were supposed to be
farming, and couldn’t deliver. However, farmers had no
choice but to participate in the grand planting campaign
because those who disobeyed were “fined, beaten and
arrested,” said the report cited by WSJ.
What,
then, is the lesson from the Burmese experience? For
one, since this government is so given to making
jatropha a crop of choice for biofuels, it must pull
back from the stampede to jatropha and biofuels in
general, which was boosted by the grim climate-change
warnings in Nobel Laureate Al Gore’s impressive
documentary on the impact of global warming and its link
to carbon emissions. At the same time, however,
Philippine leaders would do well not to totally scrap or
suspend the biofuels program just because the current
loudest complaint is that there is a rice crisis, and,
therefore, planting lands to biofuel sources like
jatropha, among others, would threaten food security.
If
there’s a lesson to be heeded from the Burmese fiasco,
it is simply this: That policy, whether in food or in
energy, must be made with the most exacting sense of
deliberateness and transparency. It must be studied by
all possible experts from cross-disciplines, given face
and debated on by stakeholders, and, most important,
brought to the public eye from the very start through a
free media. Last we checked, the supposedly quick and
dirty study promised by an affiliate of the World Bank
on jatropha’s prospects in the Philippines, with a view
to helping local policy planners and leaders balance
food versus energy priorities, was still being reviewed
in Washington. Meantime, the government would do well to
look carefully at the contracts so far given in
jatropha’s name—whether it’s in the lease or purchase of
land for planting, or as a plantation contract, or
contracts for the sale of seeds—a lucrative racket that
few people bother to look into.
We have
it on good authority that the sale of jatropha seeds is
one big racket among certain cronies and insiders; and
that, as in Burma, jatropha plantations are given out as
some sort of fundraising for retired generals like
Jovito Palparan.
Fortunately, we are still a self-described democracy,
and no one is in peril of being beaten up or arrested
for refusing to plant jatropha. Still, the lessons of
irrational planning and arbitrary governance are there
to learn from. Those burned by this bush have something
worthwhile to teach us. |
