The MMM says it wants to create a ‘super ministry’ combining the Ministries of Energy and Agriculture to combat environmental challenges. Put in plain language, what it is promising is to set up a dedicated ministry for the Independent Power Producers (IPPs), which is the only policy link between energy and agriculture. The proposal shows that the MMM is yet wedded to a peculiar brand of right-wing environmentalism, an ideology that the mounting evidence is making harder to sustain. 

To understand the roots of this ideology, it’s important to remember the role that the MMM played in setting up the IPPs. By 2000, the Mauritian sugar industry was in a grave crisis, bereft of favourable prices in its traditional European markets. In 2001-2002, the MMM and the MSM embarked on a rescue operation for the sugar industry which rested on two apparently contradictory planks. On the one hand, the state would help the industry divert some of its sugar land to sell as real estate at inflated prices by waiving some taxes and throwing in permanent residencies for the industry’s customers. On the other hand, the state turned the sugar industry into a rentier-industry by signing contracts to buy power produced by burning coal and bagasse from them. 

Given this background, the MMM is peddling a couple of fictions. The first is that it’s always been green. In 2001, it was the MMM and the MSM that looked to build a coal power plant in Pointe-aux-Caves. Then when CT Power came along, their objection was not that it was a coal plant but that it was done without a tender. That was a long time ago, fair enough. But in patting itself on the back for turning bagasse from an insult to an asset while addressing a meeting on environmentalism is a mixture of exaggeration and spin. 

The exaggeration: bagasse is just not that important. It should have been obvious that encouraging the sugar industry to sell off its land as real estate at exaggerated prices while at the same time giving them contracts to produce power from coal and bagasse would end up with the IPPs relying mostly on coal. Today, more than 70 per cent of all energy produced by IPPs is from coal, or as the current energy minister put it, “a mix of coal and bagasse, predominantly coal, but also some bagasse.” Not for nothing is energy production the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country. While everybody else is fixated on how much small planters get for selling their bagasse to the IPPs, it seems to be ignored just how irrelevant bagasse is becoming. 

The spin: addressing a meeting on global warming while praising bagasse, of course, ignores the obvious fact that bagasse is a source of greenhouse gases itself. The MMM and the IPPs have long coasted on conflating ‘clean’ and ‘renewable’ energy. Bagasse is renewable because we don’t have to import it, but since we burn it to produce power, releasing greenhouse gases, it obviously is not ‘clean’. Singing paeans to bagasse while sounding the alarm on global warming is just another indication that the MMM is still firmly stuck within the myriad contradictions of right-wing environmentalism. It’s hard for the party to break from the IPPs. 

A special ministry for the IPPs tackling global warming and climate change challenges is a bit like the Mauritius Meat Authority being put in charge of promoting vegetarianism. Something just doesn’t make sense. But then again the MMM’s faux-environmentalism has long ceased making much sense.