Government going for jatropha big-time

GOTCHA, Published in The Philippine Star, Friday, December 14, 2007

After a year-and-a-half of testing, government is ready to propagate jatropha large-scale. Everything is in place. The best of 25 local nut varieties have been classified from 500 trial hectares in Cagayan de Oro and Nueva Ecija. Oil extractors have been invented. Public interest has been preened, and private firms have pitched in. One company has bioengineered a fast-growing strain; another has refined the nut oil into high-grade biodiesel. Confident farmers have experimented harvests in 850 hectares in Butuan and General Santos cities. What’s next is for the PNOC-Alternative Fuels Corp. to set up seed centers and oil expellers in interested communities.

Economies of scale tops the bill. AFC president Peter Anthony Abaya is scouting for communities that can spare 3,000-5,000 contiguous hectares for the new cash crop. The area may be loamy or sandy, rich or marginal, flatland or rolling hills — but it has to be idle. The AFC does not want to compete with land use for food, and so is benignly looking only at vacant.

The aim is to augment farmers’ incomes. The AFC initially will give seeds for free. Having studied the highest fruiting and oil yielding species, it knows what variety is suitable for the area’s terrain and climate. Jatropha is low maintenance. It can grow even only with seasonal rains. But for top productivity, watering the plant in the first year would be best. Pruning is also needed so that the tree does not grow too high for nuts to be harvested handily. A young tree can begin to fruit by the twelfth month; peak yields begin on the third or fourth year, onwards to over 50 years. (The Biofuel Development Consortium of three private firms has cultivated a “super-jatropha” that fruits in eight to ten months, and each nut’s body weight is 32-35% oil.) The AFC commits to buy the yield at P3.50 per kilo. From an average harvest of ten tons per hectare, the farmer makes P35,000, general manager Clovis Tupaz calculates.

The AFC has many farm cooperative models to choose from. Decades of operations have perfected seed selling and leaf buying stations in North Luzon, copra trading in South Luzon and Mindanao, and rice and corn transporting everywhere. Once a right-sized area is ready, the AFC will set up a seed nursery that will supply the best varieties and train participants. An oil expeller plant, which Abaya describes as a medium-size factory, will buy the harvest and extract the oil. From there trucks or ships will take the oil to biodiesel refiners. Chemrez, one of two biggest makers of coco-diesel, successfully has blended jatropha oil with imported diesel for use in cars. (India is in the middle of a two-year experiment using pure jatropha biofuel for train locomotives.) Jatropha, unlike sugarcane or corn, requires no replenishing. Plant and nurture it once, and three generations can partake of its yield revenues.

The AFC’s first commercial venture is not as small as Abaya’s desired 3,000-5,000 hectares. Gov. Rafael Nantes of Quezon is consolidating 100,000 hectares of idle lands for the AFC’s first seed nursery-oil expeller by the first quarter of 2008. Quezon is coconut country, the biggest supplier of coco-methyl ester as substitute to imported diesel. But copra has been selling for $1,000 a ton for three years and higher prices are expected from use in food and cosmetics. Anticipating hard times with raw materials for coco-diesel refiners in Quezon, the governor is laying down this early an alternative oil source.

Dr. Rene Velasco, AFC chairman, meanwhile is busy promoting jatropha to foreign buyers. The Biofuels Act required all filling stations in the Philippines to mix 1% biodiesel into imported stocks, with the blend to rise to 2% by 2009. But Europe, America, Japan and Korea are mulling higher biodiesel blends to clean the air in their cities. Since their oilseed sources — soy, rapeseed, linseed, palm oil — are as expensive as copra, they might turn to jatropha from the Philippines and Indonesia.

For more info, visit www.pnoc-afc.com.ph. A central repository of all information on jatropha also will be put up soon on the Internet. The Biofuel Consortium may be reached through: Dr. Eleuterio Bernardo, Biophil, +63910-2612619, engb98@gmail.com; or Mr. Pablito Villegas, Meganomics Specialists, +63917-8211548, pmvillegas2001@yahoo.com or meganomics@pldtdsl.net.

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A related letter from Carlos S. Carmona of Fort Bonifacio, Taguig:

“I read (Gotcha, 12 Dec. 2007) regarding arable yet idle lands. I have used the same argument: lots of unfarmed land is available. People can use those for pasture dairying in order to produce milk locally at lower cost. Within a hundred mile radius of Metro Manila, idle lands can be used to yield as much as 30% of its milk needs. Government and private investors have yet to take notice. An unproductive lot of 35 hectares can sustain up to a hundred milking cows by rotational grazing of the right pasture grasses.”