Farmers say the Italian energy giant’s green fuel drive has left them stranded
The Italian agent brought a flurry of excitement when he arrived in Kilifi County with news of a wonder-crop: castor.
Diego Barili was an intermediary for Eni, Italy’s state-owned energy giant. If farmers in Kilifi, north of Kenya’s port city of Mombasa, switched to growing castor, he said, he would pay life-changing cash for plants that Eni would turn into green fuel for customers including BMW, EasyJet and Ryanair.
Katsele Shauri Mitsanze was one of many who jumped at the opportunity. She planted castor across her smallholding, replacing maize she and her seven children relied on for food. They harvested the inedible castor beans and waited.
But Barili’s agents did not return.
“The officers said they would come and collect them but they never came,” said Mitsanze, 40. “My family really suffered because of the hunger.”
Through intermediaries like Barili, Eni has handed out seeds to more than a hundred thousand farmers across Kenya for a flagship project backed by the Italian government.
Italy’s populist administration hopes its Mattei Plan—named after Eni’s founder—will reset relations with Africa through investment and curb migration. Eni’s initiative is also important for the European Union, which has made biofuels crucial to its goal of cutting fossil fuel use.
Eni says its Kenya programme is “designed to avoid negative impact on food production and guarantee food security for farmers” and is having a “positive impact on local communities”.
A joint SourceMaterial and Politico investigation, based on interviews with 44 farmers across four Kenyan counties, as well as biofuel experts, activists and lawyers, raises doubts about those claims.
“My family really suffered because of the hunger”
Some castor farmers said they were plunged into poverty after crops failed or Eni’s partners did not come back to buy them. Others said that even when middlemen did return, they paid less than promised. Castor trees often died, or brought infestations of hairy caterpillars that made children’s skin itch and swell, they said.
Meanwhile, trade data analysis indicates that Eni has made up for Kenya’s failing castor harvests by shipping in vast quantities of South African rapeseed—a food crop that the EU says shouldn’t be used in renewable fuels.
“This is the exact opposite of what the project is supposed to achieve,” said Carlo Tritto, sustainable fuels manager at Transport & Environment, a non-profit group that shared the data exclusively with SourceMaterial and Politico.
Not all the farmers involved in Eni’s project complained. Of the 44 farmers interviewed for this story, two said they were satisfied with the project.
Responding to questions from SourceMaterial, Barili said he had never failed to collect harvests. Eni denied that castor had replaced food production, and said that its rapeseed imports meet requirements for sustainable fuels.
“The programme is built on a principle of voluntary participation, according to contractual terms and conditions agreed between aggregators and farmers,” an Eni spokesman said. “Farmers are free to join or exit the initiative at every cycle without any penalties.”
Biofuels bet
The European Union is betting big on the so-called bioeconomy. In November it unveiled plans to replace petrochemicals in products like plastics, building materials, chemicals and fibres with biomass—organic materials from trees and crops.
Biofuels are also a core part of the bloc’s green transition plan. Transport, particularly air travel, is among the largest causes of pollution in the EU and one of the toughest sectors to decarbonise. Brussels has set targets requiring airports to make at least 70 per cent of aviation fuel ‘sustainable’ by 2050.
Oil producers and car manufacturers have lobbied for biofuels: using them means holding onto petrol-burning engines rather than switching to electric power. Earlier this month the EU’s agriculture chief, Christophe Hansen, called for more flexible rules to stimulate biofuel production.
The EU’s biofuels push is coming at the expense of African farmers as there are insufficient mechanisms in place to protect them, said Pax Butchart, a campaigner at Biofuelwatch, a non-profit group.
“It’s a mistake politically to bet on biofuels. The traceability standards are just not there yet,” Butchart said. “Their ability to reduce carbon emissions is very suspect because of that.”
The EU is “working on an improvement of the system of sustainable certification”, a European Commission spokeswoman said.
‘Selling hope’
In 2022 Eni’s third-party agents began traveling between rural Kenyan villages, drawing crowds with news of a drought-resistant crop that would thrive where maize and beans failed.
Eni says its project has so far enrolled 130,000 farmers. Once their castor beans are harvested they are crushed locally into oil that is shipped to Sicily, where it is refined into fuel.
“They were selling hope,” said Cherono Kimosop, 78, a farmer from Baringo in northwestern Kenya.
David Kemei was one of the agents tasked with winning farmers over. Hired by Servizi Agricoli Forestali Africa (SAFA)—Barili’s business and one of nine Eni intermediaries identified by SourceMaterial—Kemei went from farm to farm, eventually signing up around 200 growers.
They expected that buyers would pay “a very high price”, said Kemei, 45. “We really thought that this would be one of the biggest cash crops in Kenya.”
But when the harvest came, only around 10 of Kemei’s recruits made a profit. After making promises and handing out seeds, in many cases Barili did not return to buy the crops, Kemei said.
“He was exploiting farmers,” Kemei told SourceMaterial. “After he disappeared, a lot of the farmers were left with uncollected yields so they had to destroy the harvest in order to prevent the cows from eating the castor and getting poisoned.”
Kanini Chanze Menza, 56, who planted castor seeds from another Eni intermediary in Kwale near the coast, said her family was left without food when no one came to buy it.
“We were depending on the harvest,” said Menza, who has 11 children. “There was a lot of hunger.”
Michael Mwena, who managed 1,500 Kwale farmers for Agricycle East Africa, an Eni intermediary, said they turned on him when they were left with unsold crops.
“I’m not ready to carry another bit of blame from such a kind of company,” he said. “They really betrayed my farmers.”
In Kilifi near the port city of Mombasa another agent, Bryan Mulewa, said he helped distribute seeds to 800 cultivators before the intermediary that hired him went bankrupt in 2023 after buying harvests from only 50 of them.
At his office in Naivasha, Barili declined requests for an interview and told SourceMaterial he would dismiss employees who spoke to reporters. In an email he said that allegations his company failed to collect harvests were “fake” and that for food security he always encouraged farmers to plant castor on only 30 per cent of their land.
Agricycle did not respond to a request for comment. Eni’s spokesman said:
“Contractual terms between aggregators and farmers are set by them at the beginning of the season.”
Eni had “no evidence or record” that the aggregators had changed the terms of the deals with farmers, he added, and had terminated contracts in “the few cases in which Eni Kenya learnt that the aggregator, notwithstanding the contractual obligation to do so, did not follow up properly the collection of seeds”.
Credibility gap
Local aggregators like SAFA and Agricycle are responsible for checking that castor farms meet standards set by International Sustainability & Carbon Certification, the body Eni relies on to verify that its project follows EU laws.
Customers including the airlines that buy Eni’s biofuel also rely on EU-endorsed ISCC ratings to make claims about the sustainability of their fuel, as does Eni’s refinery at Gela in Sicily.
ISCC’s audits have come under scrutiny after allegations of serial fraud in biofuel imports from Southeast Asia caused alarm in the EU. Earlier this month a SourceMaterial investigation revealed that an ISCC-certified Indonesian exporter targeted in a fraud probe supplied European energy majors, including Eni.
“We’re very sceptical about the credibility of ISCC,” said Butchart of Biofuelwatch. “We’ve done some work in the past with whistleblowers who have pointed us to endemic failings in the system, whether that’s a culture of automatic certification or levels of fraud around labelling.”
In 2024, Dutch airline KLM retracted sustainability claims about ISCC-certified fuel after a lawsuit. The same year, the European Commission launched an investigation into 20 airlines, asking them to review their biofuel claims.
Eni’s spokesman said that “some aggregators working with several farmers” had received certificates from ISCC guaranteeing a low risk of land for food crops being planted with castor.
Of the nine aggregators identified by SourceMaterial, none has a “low risk” certificate, according to ISCC’s online records. Only one, Janari Farms, previously held a certificate, which expired in August 2025.
ISCC said in a statement that it does not comment on specific cases and that compliance “is verified through independent third-party audits”.
Food security
Eni says that because its castor is grown on “degraded land” the biofuel plants are “not replacing previous food crop production”.
Safeguarding food crops is also among the conditions laid down for Eni by the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank arm that has lent $135 million for the project.
“How do you advise farmers to plant castor and not maize?”
“What the standard says is that there should be no impact on food security,” said Anastasia Ngatti, environmental specialist at the IFC. “You cannot replace corn with castor.”
But in interviews with farmers across Kenya, SourceMaterial uncovered repeated claims that planting castor instead of maize had left families without enough to eat.
Jackson Chepkaitany, a 66-year-old farmer from Koitumet in Baringo County, said he bought seeds because intermediaries told him they could be ‘intercropped’—grown among food plants in the same field.
“They enticed us by saying that they would till our land and give us the seeds, and we could also intercrop with greengrams and beans,” he said. “I had to forgo maize because we were discouraged from intercropping both. The year the castor failed, I had no reserves of maize.”
To feed his family he was forced to sell goats and scrape a pittance from charcoal burning, often relying on handouts delivered through the local chief’s office, he said.
“How do you advise farmers to plant castor and not maize, which will bring food to their tables?” said Hamisi Thuva Salim, 34, assistant chief of Mnyenzeni, a village in Kilifi County.
Valerio Bini, a University of Milan professor who interviewed 50 farmers in Eni’s project in May 2025, said that virtually all had replaced food crops with castor.
“Despite everything that’s said about using marginal lands, essentially 100 per cent of the farmers—except for very rare cases—were growing food on those fields before planting castor,” he said. “This directly competes with food production in areas where food security is already fragile.”
Crop failure
Changkmsony is not the only farmer whose castor crop failed.
Across Kenya, Eni’s project has struggled to deliver enough castor to its Sicilian refinery—so much so that it has begun to combine the castor oil it makes in Kenya with oil from rapeseed shipped from South Africa, trade data suggests.
The EU classifies rapeseed as a food crop and forbids using it in renewable fuels unless it is ‘offset’ with sustainable feedstocks elsewhere in a company’s supply chain. Eni has pledged to use rapeseed only in “marginal” quantities in Kenya, as overuse would “affect the food market globally, destabilising the availability and prices”.
South African rapeseed oil made up about 80 per cent of all vegetable oil imports from Kenya to Italy by Eni’s subsidiaries last year, according to Transport & Environment’s analysis.
“Food-crop biofuels deliver limited climate benefits, pose land-use change risks and compete with food production,” said Transport & Environment’s Tritto.
The Evnia, moored at Cape Town in February of last year with its cargo of rapeseed before heading to Mombasa
Although Eni’s spokesman said that rapeseed is acceptable for sustainable aviation fuel because it is “cultivated on severely degraded land”, EU rules state that such cultivation must not include “food and feed crops”.
Eni’s spokesman said that the company uses offsetting in its supply chain but did not respond to specific questions about whether it applies the method to rapeseed. He did not answer detailed questions about land use, saying that the Kenya project is proceeding as planned and compliant with EU rules and IFC conditions. The IFC said in a statement that “Eni remains in compliance with both the IFC’s financing conditions and performance standards.”
“IFC is aware of concerns about the welfare of smallholder farmers participating in the project and is engaging with Eni to understand the situation” and the project is not “a simple trade-off between biofuel production and food crop cultivation”, it said.
‘Path to growth’
Despite farmers’ complaints, Eni, a self-described “key player in biofuel innovation”, is pressing ahead in Kenya. Its Sicilian refinery produced 40,000 tonnes of “sustainable aviation fuel” last year, and Eni aims to supply a third of the European market, pushing capacity to more than 2 million tonnes a year by 2030.
Even as criticism mounts, Eni has been able to count on a powerful ally: the Italian government. In October, Italy’s environment and energy minister, Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, called biofuels a “path to growth for Italy, for the transformation of refineries”.
Italian delegates helped spearhead a pledge at last year’s COP30 climate summit to quadruple sustainable fuel use by 2035, while Italy has helped the EU away from an outright ban on combustion engines and towards more flexibility for the use of biofuels. At an Italy-Africa summit in Ethiopia in February, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni underlined biofuels’ key role in the EU-backed Mattei Plan.
Angelo Bonelli, an MP for Italy’s Greens and Left Alliance, told SourceMaterial that the government-run Italian Climate Fund has repeatedly refused his requests for information about its $75 million support for Eni’s “predatory” Kenyan project.
“Agricultural land is taken away—often in areas where hunger and malnutrition are everyday emergencies—to be used for biofuel crops that serve to guarantee energy for Italy rather than food for local communities,” he said.
In Baringo, farmer Pius Kipkemboi remembers how in 2022 he attended a baraza, a village meeting where SAFA’s Barili encouraged the community to embrace Eni’s biofuel crops.
A year later he cut his losses, ripping up his castor trees and replanting maize for food.
“I thought they were sincere. I thought they had done their research and that this would be a suitable place to grow castor,” he said. “They conned us.”
Additional reporting by Pierra Nyaruai and Amy Thorpe
Headline picture: Jackson Chepkaitany on his farm (SourceMaterial)
