Biopact creates the Biochar Fund

Ideas and people come and go, debates shift and opportunities change. Over the past years Biopact has been instrumental in getting a simple message across: if biofuels are going to produced, it would be interesting to take the potential of the Global South into account. The message has added a perspective to a debate that has kept growing more complex and controversial. Biofuels for transport offer certain social and environmental advantages when they are produced in a smart way. But their (indirect) effects can just as well become so problematic that they outweigh these benefits.

In order to help small farmers in Africa - which has always been our prime goal - there are perhaps more elegant and straightforward strategies. One of these consists of assisting poor farmers in fragile environments to change a destructive land use technique that keeps them in poverty into one that presents tangible benefits.

Some 300 to 500 million farmers in the tropics rely on shifting cultivation and practise a type of 'slash-and-burn' farming. This land use strategy allows them to grow crops on soils for a few years, after which they have to move on because the nutrient-poor, acidic tropical soils get depleted very rapidly. All the while, they contribute to deforestation, out of necessity.

There is a new land use strategy that could make more sense. It is based on biochar - charcoal obtained from the pyrolysis of biomass - used as a soil amendment. Biochar cures unhealthy soils and makes them fertile. This way, slash-and-burn farmers can halt deforestation, and grow more food and biomass. Biochar also doubles as a carbon sink for which credits are available.

If biochar is used as the central ingredient of a holistic development approach, it offers an opportunity to help end hunger amongst communities at the forest margins, it can help slow deforestation, it may contribute in a significant way to reducing emissions from land use change and it can be coupled to renewable energy production amongst people currently without access to modern energy services.

The Biopact sees an interesting opportunity in the concept. This is why it has created the Biochar Fund, a small social profit organisation aimed at rethinking ways to tackle the interrelated issues of hunger, deforestation, energy poverty and climate change.

By improving access to farm inputs, knowledge and output markets, the Biochar Fund helps the poorest of the poor end hunger temporarily. To consolidate the results, the nutrient-poor, acidic soils are cured with biochar. Farming communities are then connected to carbon markets to be compensated for their carbon storage effort. Healthy and fertile soils make the use of modern inputs worthwile. In a later phase the rural communities are assisted in producing biochar in efficient, micro-scale pyrolysis units that simultaneously generate electricity.

The small fund focuses on rural communities at the forest frontier in the Congo Basin. The unique ecosystems of this vast tropical rainforest stretch accross six of the poorest countries in the world: the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Cameroon.

By the end of this year, the Biochar Fund will begin to conduct trials amongst poor rural communities at two contrasting sites to investigate the feasibility of the concept. If successful, the system will be expanded fairly swiftly. This is possible because it finances itself and is relatively easy to implement by even the poorest farmers.

The potential benefits of our intervention range from the very local - improved food security and access to modern energy services - to the global - reduced deforestation and associated emissions.

With the launch of the Biochar Fund, the small group of dedicated people behind the Biopact has a new mission and lots of work to do. For this reason, this website will no longer be updated. The Biopact team wants to thank everyone who has taken an interest in bioenergy and biofuels, especially in the context of the developing world.

The debate over biofuels must continue and analyses of the longterm impacts must be strengthened and deepened. We urge all the participants in this debate to look at biofuels as an agricultural opportunity that may offer important benefits to poorer countries. But at the same time, we urge caution, because a whole series of preconditions must be met first before this force for good can emerge.

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