Many landholders and land owning politicians tried to cash in on the promising bio-fuels program through wanton land conversion, allegedly to skirt agrarian reform, among other bad goals. Some long-time settlers and indigenous peoples were displaced when their lands were used for jatropha production. For the propertied investors, the program can later become manna, since the law had given them tremendous boosters and policy perks.

With such a dubious start, especially in jatropha production, the biofuels program became controversial. Yet, many of the mistakes that accompanied its birthing can be corrected now.

The program can even be used to improve small farmers’ lives if we could correct some fallacies and misconceptions, and amend the existing law to insert preferential options for the poor provisions—or draft a new and better law. Owing to its omissions and ambiguities, the existing law can be considered as a work still in progress.

The best way, in fact, to neutralize people’s resistance and the unsavory controversies that attended the program’s start is to make sure benefits will trickle to the people this time, not to halt in the hands of big landlords, corporate interests and land grabbers. To do this, you have to work with the people.

The trainors in the Impact Assessment of Biofuels Seminar organized by the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture maintain that favored jatropha and other biofuel crops need not displace food crops. Instead, they should be used as supplemental crops that could in some cases even enrich the soil.

Jatropha could be intercropped with rice, corn, cassava and other tubers, sweet sorghum and vegetables, among others. In fact, you should only plant it with other crops as it takes at least three years before jatropha can reward you for your efforts.

Dr. Nena Espiritu, a UP Los Baños forestry professor, disclosed that 87 percent of jatropha project implementers surveyed opined that its production need not compete with food production only because you can plant it on unproductive, idle, hilly/rolling land and marginal areas and can be intercropped.

New ways of combining food production with energy crop production have already been developed. Energy crops can be targeted for the more marginal lands, while food crops can be grown on more favorable lands.

Communities and their local governments should follow their Comprehensive Land Use Plan. They should not allow the use of prime land, but use only marginal land, for ja-tropha production.

Jatropha production can help raise the incomes of small farmers and rural laborers, and may in fact lead to improved food security, stresses Dr. Espiritu.

These knowledge should now correct the bad practice of converting rice land into purely jatropha-producing land. This continues unfortunately to be done even now that we have a rice shortage and have to import rice often enough.

You also do not need a big corporate affair to process jatropha, since its production can be done in the village level, to be participated in by small farmers and their cooperatives that could either sell jatropha seeds, raise seedlings or cut-tings, or process them into their own biofuels.

Dr. Espiritu cited one local government that has ventured into assisting small farmers in processing indigenous and locally produced biofuel that it feeds to its own vehicles. The Visayas State University maintains vehicles that run on biofuels. These projects have upgraded the people’s science intelligence quotient by simply germinating biofuel crops in their communities.

Rafael Coscolouella, director of the Sugar Regulatory Administration and deputy director of the National Biofuels Board (NBB), calls for our support of the biofuels program, not just because it can provide much-needed jobs in the rural areas, but also because it can supply vital power needs. In Negros, a bioethanol project operates as a cogeneration project, producing energy uploaded to the power grid.

The program can in fact be used to spur village production centers of small farmers, rather than concentrate on big production ventures that benefit only the business sector.

The need for biofuels is tremendous. Of the country’s energy sources, coco methyl ester (CME) production can only supply less than 1 percent.

Using biofuels will greatly reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming, said forester Dr. Rodel Lasco. He shared scientific projections that if global temperature rises by two degrees, 30 percent of the world’s biodiversity will be wiped out. Dr. Lasco is one of four Filipino scientists who are members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and a co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize won by the elite group.

The Biofuels law enacted in 2007 mandated the increased use of biofuels. On February 6, the mandated minimum of 5-percent bioethanol fuel blend for gasoline became effective. Fuels available in pump stations for gasoline-fed vehicles are 10-percent bioethanol fuel blend or E-10 and pure gasoline.

On February 6, 2011, the mandated minimum of 10 percent-bioethanol fuel blend will become effective, subject to final recommendation of the NBB depending on the local supply of bioethanol.

Biofuel production can open new socioeconomic and scientific vistas for the Philippines. Agricultural research can and must help enhance overall crop productivity, while policy researches are in order to correct some of the biofuel’s law and program’s weaknesses.