The world generally, the “magnificent 7” (the 7 major oil multinationals) as well as Mauritius itself, all carry on as if oil was going to last forever. A paper on BIOFUELS, as a major altenative to petrol, presented by me at the SIDS conference, just 18 months ago attracted little attention from Mauritians, public, press and practitioners alike. Only some from Trinidad, Fiji and some other Pacific island states showed keen interest.

In 18 months the situation has changed, interest is shown in many quarters, articles are written: but apart from the Alcodis initiative of Maurel and a timid pamphlet to convince people to save electricity, no other action or adjustments are being taken. Quite in line with the present Mauritian political scene, where (some exceptions apart) the right things are stated (e.g. democratisation, participation of all) but in actual practice nothing radical is done (its still only “nou banne” everywhere).

But oil is running out. If we keep using it at the present rate (plus a 3% increase in demand per year!) all known stocks will be exhausted, according to the latest estimates, sometime between 2050 and 2080. As each of the world’s 4,000 or so oil-fields reach maximum “production”, decline to zero and close an unprecedented crisis will descend upon our globalised world. We may even find a few new oil fields, but the price of this “black gold” is bound to increase. First it will reach uneconomic and disruptive levels (e.g. the increase from US $10 to $50 per barrel from 2001 to 2004, the 2006 record level of $ 75 per barrel of crude) and then (as it runs out) to prohibitive levels (above $100/200 per barrel), putting the purchase of petrol well beyond the purse of most developing countries, and beyond the purse of the poor and middle-class in any country.

Furthermore, those countries with oil reserves (e.g. USA, Russia, Nigeria, Venezuela, the Gulf States) are increasingly likely to keep their oil for their own use instead of exporting it to countries (such as Japan, Singapore, Mauritius) which have no oil reserves and whose economy is based on imported oil. As we will see in the next article on solutions, survival for Mauritius in the transition period up to 2020 may depend on us securing diversified sources of oil and NOT on a “mari-deal” with a single supplier

Disruption of supply of petrol will become more prevalent (remember the “near miss” of April 2004 when a supply of oil from Madagascar to Mauritius was detained). I have personally witnessed, in Nigeria and Zimbabwe the social disruption caused by shortage of petrol: cars come to a halt, buses stay in their garages, ordinary people cannot go to work, power cuts increase in frequency, factories close, people fight at filling stations, corruption in daily-life goes right up, everyone suffers.

Mauritius has to prepare itself, as from now, for what could be the greatest crisis of its history, as the supply of imported oil becomes erratic and then stops altogether. Consider these as only a few of the aspects of daily-life that depends on petroleum and its products:

AIR-TRANSPORT: NO KEROSENE, NO PLANES, Mauritians cut-off from the rest of the world, no tourists except the handful coming on yachts, Rodrigues back to a sea-link, hotels remain empty, staff redundant, all air-cargo business fail, etc

LAND TRANSPORT: Back to walking and cycling(no doubt good things for healthy living) ,Mauritius wide events and set-ups becoming too expensive or downright impossible(those at bus-stops on the 1st of May 2006, not travelling to a meeting got a taste of what life can be without buses); no crowds at horse racing, centralised supermarkets giving way back to the local corner shop, disruption of supply of the thousands of different makes of soaps, soups, redundancy of the fleet of delivery vans and their personnel, car-pooling and communal taxis(as is common in Yaounde, Moscow and as taxi-trains in rural Mauritius) help for some time, but of course the LRT running on electricity produced from biofuels will still do the journey P.Louis-Curepipe in 12 minutes, but where is that LRT?

ELECTRICITY GENERATION: the continued reliance of the CEB on imported (and for certain increasingly expensive) fuel-oil is criminally short-sighted; this author was amongst those who criticised the CEB some years ago for purchasing and installing 2 new diesel-powered generators, instead of developing locally available energy sources. Fortunately some far-sighted entrepreneurs got into electricity generation from bagasse, which is independent of oil supplies and is sustainable

SCHOOLING: give up the notion of National colleges, since the daily transport of students over long distances will be increasingly difficult and expensive; the ideal being to walk to school! (That is already the case for example for the kids of Mahébourg town going to Mahebourg RCA for primary schooling and to Loreto College Mahebourg for Form 1-V1 secondary studies), teachers similarly will likely teach in their local schools; much of tertiary training can be through local “antennes”, residential campuses and of course via virtual universities;

INDUSTRY: Industrial production, which depends on imported raw material and is sold on distant foreign markets, will most likely suffer regression, as will all things global, for example textile and perishable fruits for export. Sugar and other commodities produced locally and transformed locally as well as all things cyber will gain tremendously in importance. Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia) of the Smith era and present day Cuba (whether you like these regimes or not) are extraordinary models of survival of economies in the absence of import/export, a fate that could hit many isolated Small Island Developing States, like Comoros, Seychelles, Fiji, Mauritius.

The solutions (see next week’s Live’n’Learn) are, of course, alternative energy supplies on full industrial scale, bio-fuels, particularly ethanol for us, and generally learning to live at village level, producing all the food, energy and supplies one requires. It means changing lifestyles to learn to live happily with much less, to learn to recycle everything, to collaborate with friends and neighbours in exchanging products and services. This means gradually (within the period 2006-2020) re-engineering Mauritius, to successfully thrive in the “l’apres-pétrole” era. Such considerations have budget implications for now and for the next 10-15 budgets, favouring sustainability and locally self-sufficient solutions, offering immediate support for investors in new energy technologies as these emerge, managing the pump-price of diesel (the driving-force of industry, specially SMEs) to keep it at affordable level for as long as possible, all out support for bio-fuels production, our energy life-line for the future.

On a world scale I can predict that those individuals, companies and countries who first master the research for hybrid cars (Japan and Germany), for a sustainable replacement for petrol (France with all its TGV able to run on nuclear electricity), who first find a replacement for aviation kerosene, WILL PROSPER NO END! How many small-island developing states will succeed this transition? Mauritius has all the brainpower needed to do so, provided all aboard work together.

<B>Dr. Michael ATCHIA

[email protected]</B>