India’s agrofuel policies from a feminist-environmentalist perspective

Abstract

India, facing a growing economy on the one hand and enormous poverty of its population on the other, has developed several policies on biofuels since 2002. The Indian state promotes projects on plants such as Jatropha for biodiesel. In these policies, mitigation of climate change is only one aim of the Indian state. Supply with Indian-made fuel is supposed to enhance economic growth, air pollution should be diminished and poor rural women should be given income opportunities. The national policy for biodiesel from 2008 states that till 2017 20% of the diesel used in India should come from plants, grown and transesterized in India. Enormous efforts from the Indian states and private companies will be necessary. The resources needed for this kind of production - land, water and human work - are limited. NGOs as well as state institutions debate whether the production and use of biofuel can ever be sustainable. The contested policies on biofuel in India are therefore one example of debates on sustainability and the underlying values and ideas about a satisfying livelihood for the Indian people. From a feminist-environmentalist perspective the questions to be asked are not only in which ways men and women are effected differently by, for example, Jatropha plantations. Rather it is important to ask in what ways sustainability is conceptualized and how nature as well as gender features in these concepts. The way we think about material resources such as land, water and human resources, e.g. female reproductive work, show some parallels. Both kinds of resources are seldom thought of as valuable just because they sustain human life, but rather, only if and when they can be monetarized as commodity. In order to figure out ways to provide sustainable livelihoods for everyone, we need to change the way nature and gender are conceptualized in strategies to cope with the ecological crisis. This includes a change of ethics towards a focus on what is necessary for the ‘Good Life’. The paper will analyze the concepts of sustainability in Indian biofuel policies from a feminist-environmentalist perspective as well as show an alternative way of thinking about ecology and gender.