The Big Biofuels Blog

Will biofuels marginalise women in the developing world? The FAO thinks that it might. In a rather negative report it concludes that biofuels will be farmed on marginal land, which is currently used by women to farm subsistence crops, it also assumes that biofuels need high levels of highly expensive fertilisers and other scarce inputs. But if plants like jatropha which need minimal levels of fertiliser take off and the price of the oil they produce is linked to expensive oil then it could be a way to break out of a subsistence mindset, which has worked so spectacularly well in Zimbabwe in recent years.