During his weekly address to the nation, Correa said that his administration was reviewing a plan to begin developing biofuels, because Ecuador has a large untapped agricultural potential:

 

    Ecuador has the capacity to feed 80 million people and we only have 13 million people. In other words, there is land available to develop the agricultural industry. - Rafael Correa, President of Ecuador

 

Correa, a US-educated economist, cited several reasons for his turn towards biofuels, the most important one being the skyrocketing costs of imported fuel products.

 

    [Biofuels] would allow us to diversify our energy mix, currently based on petroleum derivatives, and save enormous amounts of hard currency lost in importing gasoline and other fuels.

 

Despite being the fifth-largest oil producer in Latin America, Ecuador imports gasoline at an annual cost of some $3.6 billion - a heavy burden on the nation`s economy.

 

Biofuels could also boost the local farming sector and restore large tracts of degraded land. Correa said some 50,000 hectares (123,450 acres) of sugar cane could be planted immediately - a minimal amount compared with the 5 million hectares (12.3 million acres) of farmland classified as degraded. This exhausted land could be restored by introducing biofuel crops. Correa said that sugar-cane ethanol, a biofuel already sold in some parts of the Andean nation, would be highly efficient.

 

The feasibility of producing biofuels from non-edible feedstocks like jatropha and castor, which grow abundantly in the wild in Ecuador, is being researched: