TY - JOUR
T1 - What wastelands? A critique of biofuel policy discourse in South India
AU - Baka, Jennifer
N1 - Funding Information:
The author would like to thank the Fulbright IIE Program, the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies, the Yale South Asian Studies Program and the Yale Center for Industrial Ecology for research funding, and the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University for sponsoring my Fulbright award. Assistance is gratefully acknowledged from the journal’s anonymous reviewers, and from Rob Bailis, Carol Carpenter, Marian Chertow, Mathew Decker, K.T. Gandhirajan, Stefan Lewellen, Ajit Menon, M. Paramathma, K. Sivaramakrishnan, M. Vijayabaskar invaluable research guidance and support.
PY - 2014/7
Y1 - 2014/7
N2 - Mirroring global trends in biofuel policy making, the Government of India recently enacted a policy restricting feedstock cultivation to 'wastelands', a government designation for marginal lands. This strategy, the government asserts, will help improve the country's energy security, mitigate climate change and reduce rural poverty through job creation. As other critical biofuels scholarship has documented, land categorizations like 'wasteland' are political constructs homogenously applied to indicate 'empty', 'unproductive' land 'available' for development. While claiming that such constructions mask socio-political relations on the ground, little evidence has been offered analyzing the impacts of these omissions or evaluating how wasteland constructions are sustained. This paper provides such an analysis through a case study of Jatropha curcas biodiesel promotion on wastelands in Tamil Nadu, India. I find that Prosopis juliflora on Tamil Nadu's wastelands currently supports a dynamic energy economy servicing both rural and urban consumers. The Prosopis economy provides substantially more energy services, jobs and economic development opportunities than would Jatropha biodiesel. Yet political relations amongst stakeholders obscure the Prosopis economy from biofuel policy dialogs. That Prosopis was originally spread throughout India as part of a wasteland development program of the 1970s underscores the deeply political nature of the concept of wasteland. These findings demonstrate that marginal lands, as currently constructed, do not exist. By extension, locating biofuels on such lands is not the 'win-win' strategy for simultaneously addressing energy security, climate change and rural poverty that advocates suggest.
AB - Mirroring global trends in biofuel policy making, the Government of India recently enacted a policy restricting feedstock cultivation to 'wastelands', a government designation for marginal lands. This strategy, the government asserts, will help improve the country's energy security, mitigate climate change and reduce rural poverty through job creation. As other critical biofuels scholarship has documented, land categorizations like 'wasteland' are political constructs homogenously applied to indicate 'empty', 'unproductive' land 'available' for development. While claiming that such constructions mask socio-political relations on the ground, little evidence has been offered analyzing the impacts of these omissions or evaluating how wasteland constructions are sustained. This paper provides such an analysis through a case study of Jatropha curcas biodiesel promotion on wastelands in Tamil Nadu, India. I find that Prosopis juliflora on Tamil Nadu's wastelands currently supports a dynamic energy economy servicing both rural and urban consumers. The Prosopis economy provides substantially more energy services, jobs and economic development opportunities than would Jatropha biodiesel. Yet political relations amongst stakeholders obscure the Prosopis economy from biofuel policy dialogs. That Prosopis was originally spread throughout India as part of a wasteland development program of the 1970s underscores the deeply political nature of the concept of wasteland. These findings demonstrate that marginal lands, as currently constructed, do not exist. By extension, locating biofuels on such lands is not the 'win-win' strategy for simultaneously addressing energy security, climate change and rural poverty that advocates suggest.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.08.007
DO - 10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.08.007
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84901592887
SN - 0016-7185
VL - 54
SP - 315
EP - 323
JO - Geoforum
JF - Geoforum
ER -