While Angola and Nigeria has witnessed oil profits in recent decades, if observers are to be believed, there seems to be a potential for the continent in the form of increase in demand for biofuels.
Biofuels , broadly speaking is defined as liquid or gas fuels obtained from biomass, bring forth significantly less ozone-damaging carbon emissions than fossil fuels such as coal and petroleum.
In a 2006 Green Paper ‘A European Strategy for Sustainable, Competitive and Secure Energy’, the European Union (EU) affirmed that “the new EU-Africa strategy, envisaging interconnections of energy systems as a priority area, could also help Europe to diversify its oil and gas supply sources.”
According to Teodsio Bule, a policy officer with the Secretariado Tecnico de Segurana Alimentar e Nutricional (SETSAN, Poverty, Food Security and Nutrition Secretariat) based in Maputo in Mozambique, there is a ‘potential market’ for these in European market.
European officials have been prurient about the existence of such a market and suggestions have already started pouring from them. Some have mulled the idea of creation of a African Union (AU).
It may be recalled that the AU is the successor body to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), established in 1963 and disbanded in 2002.
Over the years, Africa has seen sporadic civil wars in the continent, but much to the relief of everyone, many of them coming to an end with relatively transparent and fair elections held in nations such as Congo and Liberia earlier plagued with widespread corruption.
“This relationship, which was very much a donor-recipient relationship, is evolving into a dialogue on many issues and not just concentration on development,” says Marie-Laure de Bergh, a programme officer with the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM) in Brussels.
Image:teriin
Via:allafrica
