Sugarcane for sustainable development?
Published on by Claudia Casarotto, Innovations for Poverty Action - Deputy Country Director - Kenya
A recent article by two research fellows of the Stockholm Environment Institute explores the potential that sugarcane has to lift many African coutnries out of poverty http://bit.ly/13uoCme
The authors argue that "sugarcane in sub-Saharan Africa is a concrete example of an agro-industrial sector whose advancement can help address the triple challenge of energy insecurity, climate change and rural poverty".
But sugarcane is also a crop that requires a lot of water and it is a monocuture that is profitable only when practiced on large scale and with modern technologies. Do you think that biofuels and monocultures are the answer to Africa's energy probelm? What do you think would be the nexus between energy security and food security?