Large-scale biofuel production and food security of smallholders: Evidence for Jatropha in Madagascar

Large-scale agricultural investment in land was found to lead to positive employment and poverty reduction effects, however depending on the institutional context and the type of investment. This article aims to provide insights into the relationship between wage work for a large-scale Jatropha project and household food security, namely dietary diversity and food shortage. After the initial hype and the subsequent downfall of Jatropha, new projects are still being undertaken, yet little evidence in quantifying the long-term impacts of large-scale Jatropha production on smallholders livelihoods exists. This article contributes to addressing this gap by using five rounds of panel data collected from 2008 to 2013 from 390 randomly selected households near a Jatropha project in Madagascar. Results show that labour demand declined substantially after the build-up phase and incomes from wage work were mostly used for food and other necessities. Impacts are estimated with the help of fixed effects models. Jatropha wage work contributed significantly to improved dietary diversity but not to a reduction of food shortage. Food production and consumption furthermore were highly influenced by seasonality, drought and locust plagues, which implies that complementing income creation with agricultural development strategies might have further positive effects on food security. Acknowledgement : We thank the foundation Stiftung Energieforschung Baden-Wuerttemberg for funding this research, the respondents in the commune of Fenoarivo for their continued participation in the survey, and the field assistants and enumerators for their efforts in data collection. We are grateful to Romaine and Sylvain Ramananarivo for useful discussions and Ana Lucia Kassouf for providing comments on an earlier version of the article.