Papua New Guinea

First activities of utilisation of Jatropha curcas

Letter of Bruce Smith of Support Services Contracting Facility (SSCF)

I am happy to be included in your web site  but at the moment there is little to tell you. Our project is Asian Development Bank funded and is aiming to re-vitalize the extension system which has, along with the Agricultural Research Institute nearly collapsed - for all of the usual reasons.

We have been in operation for nearly six months, travelling the province where we are based, talking to farmers and extension workers about the constraints that they face. One key problem is a crumbling road network so the idea of using the small Dong Feng walking tractors came to mind. Another problem is soil erosion and declining soil fertility. Add to this the problem of pigs damaging coffee and the Jatropha system came to mind.

 Oil for the tractors and lamps and soap, seed cake for fertility, the plants, used as a pig fence, and, probably interplanted with vitver, for erosion control. Small tractors have a lot of uses: Transporting coffee or cocoa, driving coffee pulpers (a labour constraint) and making land preparation easier for the cultivation of legumes. The legumes are to fix nitrogen as well as provide edible oil and poultry feed, the press for Jatropha being used for vegetable oil as well. Rather than buying day old chicks brought from the urban hatchery  a village run incubator using Jatropha oil will cut chick costs by half. One of our mandates is to raise income for women which fits well with the above.

Our aim is to encourage specialization within villages to raise productivity. There will be only one tractor owner who will provide ploughing and transport services. Others will produce/collect Jatropha, others will own the press. We want to see a market develop for village produced stockfeed and seed cake as well as soap. By cutting down expenditures on increasingly expensive transport we expect a rise in the village standard of living.

We have not figured out yet how to get this batch of technologies out on a trail basis but may select model villages and offer them the equipment at half price and the advice for free. The edible varieties in Mexico would be ideal for inclusion as a poultry feed. From our knowledge to date we think that Jatropha will grow in the hills between 1000-2000 metres but this is a question. We have some out being tried now.We are also unsure how a vegetable fired diesel will perform at altitude.

You may be interested in the process of coming to the Jatropha idea. It was serendipity. My first thought was its use as a rat poison, there is some evidence of its use here and we are having a huge problem in one of the districts.  When I started to do some research on this I remembered seeing Jatropha in Mali when I was there on  bio-pesticide project. At the time I did not pay much attention (in hind sight I now wish that I had!). Finding the Jatropha web-site and the information about the press got me hooked as I had worked with small oil presses in Zambia 20 years ago and we never found a good design. The Bielenberg press impressed me. So here we are about to set up some demonstrations of our own "system".

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 last modification  03.02.03