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LIBERIA: New life for old rubber trees - Monday, June 21, 2010 |
MONROVIA, 18 June 2010 (IRIN) - At first glance it looks like a fully grown tropical forest, but among the thick undergrowth, the trees still stand in lines, their trunks deeply scarred. This was once a productive rubber plantation; now it is part of Liberia's estimated 600,000ha of overgrown and moribund rubber farms.
To fell the trees and clear the land for replanting means backbreaking labour, followed by a long wait until the new trees grow big enough to be tapped. But for a Canadian renewable energy company, it is a potentially limitless supply of fuel for power stations. The fuel also attracts none of the carbon taxes increasingly being levied on power companies that use fossil fuels.
Buchanan Renewables has already started work. Its huge diggers can be seen near Kakata, in the west, uprooting the trees. Another machine - a giant mincer - takes the trunks and grinds them up, spewing out a growing pile of rubberwood chips, which are then trucked to the port of Buchanan and exported.
For general manager Liam Hickey, the project has huge benefits: the farmers get their land cleared and replanted, Liberia gets a new source of export revenue, and power stations get a reliable source of sustainable fuel. Normally rubber trees need to be replaced once they are over 25 years old.
"These trees are not producing anything," Hickey told IRIN. "They are absolutely past it. Most of them are between 30 and 60 years old. And the problem the farmers face is that that you can't raise micro-finance in this country. So how do they take down all these trees, buy all the seedlings, plant and wait for seven years? That's not a good situation to be in at all."
The company offers farmers a deal. It buys the tree trunks for US$2 a tonne (there should be almost 1MT of usable wood in a large tree), replants the land, free of charge, with new rubber trees, and the farmers also get the roots and smaller branches to burn for charcoal or sell as firewood. Buchanan Renewables is working with big rubber estates, but also with smallholders, provided there is a big enough area for it to be worth bringing in the diggers.
It represents some urgently needed investment in a country that, seven years after the end of its civil war, still finds it hard to deliver the jobs, opportunities and improved living standards that peace promised.
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