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The Expansion of Biofuels as a Perturbation to the Social-Ecological Resilience of Food Systems: Ethiopia

This project focuses on biofuel introduction or expansion as a policy response, so that biofuels can be framed as a perturbation to the food system at multiple scales, allowing the impacts on social-ecological resilience that emerge to be identified. The current literature presents evidence that biofuels can erode the resilience of social-ecological systems, for example via deforestation, agricultural run-off and conversion of peat lands. However, there are also opportunities for biofuels to enhance the resilience of social-ecological systems- for example by the substitution of traditional biomass in rural households in developing countries. This would reduce deforestation in the immediate area or increase agricultural residues returned to agricultural land, whilst allowing households to move up the energy ladder. This project will produce a systems analysis of the impacts of biofuel expansion, summarising the impacts on social-ecological resilience at multiple scales, from the household to the supra-national level and focusing on systems where biofuel substitutes for low grade fossil fuels as well as affecting food production.

Biofuel expansion is explored in Ethiopia, as the introduction of the ‘Biofuel Development and Utilisation Strategy of Ethiopia’ in September 2007 mandated the use of biofuels for both the transport and domestic market. By framing food systems at multiple scales- household, regional, national and supra-national- as adaptive cycles we can examine the cascading impacts due to biofuel expansion.

At the household level, the diversity of entitlements (i.e. how a household accesses its food) is investigated for three groups of actors:

Those working on sugar estates

Those residing in the surrounding towns

Those moved off their land for the expansion of the sugar estates

Concurrently, the impacts of substituting low-grade fossil fuels for ethanol within the home are investigated- focussing on changes in expenditure on energy, health benefits of removing wood smoke from confined areas, and time savings.

At the regional scale, the biophysical impacts of the expansion of the sugar cane estates are investigated, whilst at the national scale the production and consumption chain findings are scaled up to produce an analysis of the impact of biofuel expansion on food production and consumption, incorporating land use change, crop substitutions, food price changes and job creations.

At a supra-national level, scenario analysis is used to investigate what surprises Ethiopia may be liable to by entering the global trade markets for sugar and ethanol, so to identify any possible transformations and alternative stable states.

Project Goals

1) A whole-system analysis of the sugarcane and ethanol biofuels system in Ethiopia.
2) Inform the sugar estate managers of the energy-balance of Ethiopian ethanol from sugar cane molasses.
3) Inform the related NGO and government ministries of the potential for ethanol as a household fuel.