The Hindu Business Line : Jatropha beckons

The jatropha shrub, a cash crop yielding the promise of oil, is instigating what could roughly be termed as reverse migration in some of the North East states. Take, for instance, Temsu Longchar, who had made Delhi his home with a well-paying job at a BPO company or Merin Lamtur, an ex-IBM Daksh employee. They both have preferred to leave the urban clutter of Delhi to return to the green slopes Nagaland, their home State, for a piece of the jatropha cultivation pie.

During a phase of intense urbanisation and movement of people from villages and farms to urban centres, Longchar and Lamtur and several others are bucking the trend to return to the hinterland and be part of a farming initiative that has seemingly taken Nagaland and a handful of other States by storm.

Jatropha curcas is a poisonous shrub of the euphorbia family, originating in Central America, and is believed to have potential to yield oil, though it is still to be tested for large-scale commercial applications. India has been encouraging its use in biodiesel production.

Though it has no applications in the food sector, its chief selling point as a bioenergy crop is that it grows in marginal, eroded land and is resistant to drought. So, as supporters of the jatropha revolution claim, the crop is not expected to compete for land where food could be grown, nor does it require a lot of water, fertilisers or pesticides. With global oil prices hitting the roof in recent months, jatropha cultivation is increasingly being seen as an option by small and marginal farmers.

In the North East region, so far nearly 40,000 hectares of wasteland — largely where jhum cultivation (slash-and-burn system of cultivation) has been practised — have begun to be covered with jatropha plantations. In Nagaland itself, jatropha plantations have sprung up on the hills adjoining Dimapur, the commercial capital of the State. The farmers hope to double their income when the plant matures and its seeds can be sold for extraction of green fuel.

Buyback guarantee

However, the farmers insist that jatropha would be their secondary income, as they plan to continue with their present livelihood options. The staple upland paddy and Naga Dali (soya bean) are among the primary crops grown in the region. What’s fuelling the jatropha plantation is a buyback guarantee for seeds extended by companies such as D1-BP Fuel Crops, a joint venture between BP and D1 Oils.

The company has been operating in India for the past three years with plantations of over 80,000 hectares of marginal land, and is very active in the North East. The UK-based global biodiesel producer D1 Oils — the world’s largest commercial jatropha cultivator which recently organised a media tour to the region — approaches farmers with marginal land through the local partnerships it has set up.

In Nagaland, the company’s alliance is with Zingchar Bio-Initiatives, a unit floated by first-generation Naga entrepreneur Lawrence Jamang. Jamang not only oversees the operations of D1-BP Williamson Magor in the State, but also gives the buyback guarantee for jatropha seedsin the Naga villages adjoining Dimapur and distributes saplings free of cost. His employees, including the Delhi-returned Longchar and Lamtur, tour the villages to motivate farmers to undertake jatropha cultivation to overcome poverty and backwardness. They also train the farmers, besides explaining the economics of bio-diesel. According to Jamang, so far nearly 4,000 cultivators in Nagaland and Manipur have taken up jatropha as an alternative crop.

Zingchar uses the trickledown route to convince farmers. The company first approaches the village headmen to familiarise them with the project. The headmen, in turn, take on the task of convincing others. Hokuto Jimo, headman of Hozukhe village, says many families in his village embarked on jatropha cultivation after he cultivated it on two hectares belonging to him. Now he and his brother Yaghoto plan to extend the cultivation to nearly 5,000 hectares owned by them across the hills. The people assisting him in the venture include those many who have returned from jobs in metropolitan cities and towns, he says.

D1 Williamson Magor Bio Fuel Ltd has initiated free distribution of jatropha saplings and the buyback guarantee is part of its project to build sufficient feedstock for the production of 400 million litres of biodiesel a year through contract farming on 2 lakh hectares in the east and north-eastern region by 2010. The company is also expected to set up a seed expelling unit in Dimapur later this year.

Blending plans

The success of the jatropha initiative, however, clearly rests on the Centre’s plans for petroleum companies to blend conventional diesel with up to five per cent of biodiesel, though this is yet to be made mandatory as in the case of ethanol, where a mandatory five per cent blend has been introduced.

The price at which petroleum companies will buy biodiesel from producers has been fixed at Rs 25 a litre. While farmers, it seems, have been enthusiastic about the venture, sceptics have questioned the entire jatropha initiative. They feel that the commercial viability of the crop remains untested even as huge tracks of land are being put under cultivation across Chhattisgarh and some north-eastern States like Nagaland, Manipur and Meghalaya. Also, at a time when food prices are shooting up across the world and with Indian inflation driven to a three-year high, the debate continues on how far it is justified to plant a cash crop like jatropha.

Though the jatropha planters claim they are using only wasteland, critics feel that farmers are being lured into substituting food crops for jatropha through buyback guarantees. Though it is too early to say how the jartopha story will pan out eventually, one thing is certain — that it is managing to lure people to return home and get back to the business of tilling their land.

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