Small farmers and communities

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Bioenergy > Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels > RSB Working Group on Social Impacts > Small farmers and communities

This page is specially dedicated to the discussions on biofuels opportunities to enhance rural development, in particular the participation and access to benefits for smallholders and local communities.

Background

The different discussions happening within the frame of the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels have shown that a special attention must be given to small farmers, producers and communities. First, one of the major opportunities raised by biofuels is rural development, especially for small farmers and vulnerable communities. Which governance structures are needed beside standards to ensure an actual benefit sharing among these actors? Second, given the high level of exigency requested by standards on biofuel production, it is likely that small farmers may face difficulties to comply with the standards. Which efforts must be undertaken by the RSB to support small farmers complying with the standards?

Comments and Opinions from Participants

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• How Good Enough Biofuel Governance Can Help Rural Livelihoods: Making Sure that Biofuel Development Works for Small Farmers and Communities, an article by Olivier Dubois.
  

Extract:
The implementation of biofuel schemes can be compared to battles given the diversity and uncertainties of landscape conditions, and of the various and often diverging interests at play. In such contexts, power plays an important role in decision-making. Therefore it is important to ensure that biofuel development at least does not harm and, preferably, favours the livelihood strategies of small-scale producers and communities in rural areas. (...) The crux of the matter to achieve this lies in ’good enough’ governance mechanisms at the interface between sustainable biofuel development (SBD) and sustainable livelihoods of rural people. This paper discusses these around three main aspects of biofuel development, i.e.
- Sustainability: what it means and how to achieve it at local level;
- Contractual arrangements between biofuel companies and small-scale farmers, and
- Decentralised/community-type biofuel schemes.

The successful implementation of these aspects requires some common ingredients, i.e.
- They are closely linked to smallholders and communities’ livelihoods;
- They involve many stakeholders, from different arenas, with different interest and power, and at different levels;
- As a result of the above, adequate stakeholder participation in multistakeholder processes is a key ingredient for their success;
- Market forces play an important role in their implementation, but there are also no doubts that non-market mechanisms are a necessary complement to correct market failures;
- Linked to the above, their successful implementation requires a mixture of regulations and voluntary instruments;
- They often have an iterative character in that their implementation often requires some dose of action-learning;
- Given their (potentially) participatory and iterative character, they are often able to highlight critical gaps in policy and institutional processes;
- As in the case of any new instrument, where they have an innovative character, their major implementation constraints have to do with policy and institutional weaknesses, such as missing policies or regulations, insecure stakeholders’ rights over the resource at stake, unclear and/or anachronistic institutional arrangements, conflicting policy signals lack of information or misinformation, and weak implementation capacities.

(...)The current dynamics in biofuel requires the integration of science and politics to make sense and navigate in the biofuel battlefield. Working on these matters can be compared to embarking on an adventurous journey: one knows the general direction, but several twists and turns make it impossible to predict the itinerary in advance. Under such circumstance, bringing about SBD requires an approach having the following characteristics:
- Continuous monitoring and negotiation;
- Avoidance of ‘consensual consultative stagnation’ and use of interim working agreements in order to proceed;
- Opportunity for monitored experimentation;
- Being flexible and iterative; and
- A long time horizon.