When Addax Bioenergy shortly begins exporting ethanol from a sugar cane plantation in Sierra Leone to the EU to be used in petrol, it will be the first biofuels to be exported from Africa to Europe in commercial quantities.
The EU claims that it does not import biofuels crops from Africa’s poorest countries because of the potential impact that its biofuel policies have on decreasing the amount of land that can be used to grow food and therefore increasing hunger.
ActionAid has found evidence from visits to the Addax project in the Bombali district of Sierra Leone and from carrying out 100 interviews with local people that the project is having negative effects on many of the 13,000 people in 60 villages.