Resource information
Mali, a landlocked West African nation
at the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, has introduced a
program to produce biodiesel using jatropha curcas, a
non-edible shrub widely available throughout the country by
farmers for generations as a living fence for their gardens.
The aim of the program is to partially substitute diesel,
which is entirely supplied through imports, with domestic
biodiesel produced from a feedstock that does not have any
commercial value otherwise and thus has zero opportunity
cost. This paper uses a computable general equilibrium model
to investigate economy-wide and distributional impacts of
large-scale jatropha production on different types of lands,
and conversion of jatropha oil to biodiesel for domestic
consumption. It assesses impacts on agricultural and other
commodity markets, resource and factor markets, and
international trade. The results are fed into a detailed
household survey-based micro-simulation model to assess
impacts on poverty and income distribution. The study finds
that the expansion of jatropha farming would be beneficial
in terms of both macroeconomic and distributional impacts as
long as idle lands, which have been neither used for
agriculture nor protected as forests, are utilized. However,
if jatropha plantation is carried out on existing
agriculture lands, the economy-wide impacts would be
negative although it would still help reduce rural poverty.
