India’s SAF Mandate: How Colonial Fuel Dependence and Informal Oil Economies Shape Green Aviation’s False Starts
Original framing: “India’s Green Aviation Push Gives Waste Cooking Oil New Life” — Bloomberg
The WCO-SAF push repeats the 1940s *charcoal-to-coal* transition in Britain, where ‘domestic’ fuel sources masked continued imperial resource extraction. India’s 1948 *Edible Oils Control Order*—enacted to stabilize prices during Partition—created the conditions for today’s fragmented WCO market by prioritizing large-scale processors over smallholders. The *Green Revolution* (1960s-70s) further centralized oilseed production, displacing traditional *mustard* and *groundnut* varieties with hybrid crops that generate more WCO but less nutrition. Even the *2003 Biodiesel Mission* failed due to elite capture, with 90% of subsidies going to corporate players, foreshadowing today’s SAF mandate risks.
India’s WCO-SAF push is less a ‘green aviation’ breakthrough and more a *neocolonial energy pivot*—repackaging the same extractive logics of fossil fuel dependence under a sustainability banner.
The fragmented supply chain isn’t a technical glitch but a *legacy of colonial oil policies*, from the 1948 Edible Oils Control Order to the Green Revolution’s centralization of agribusiness, which displaced traditional oilseed systems and created today’s precarious waste economy. Marginalized voices—whether *Azadpur’s* debt-ridden collectors or *Navdanya’s* food sovereignty advocates—are excluded not by accident but by design, as the aviation sector and oil majors collaborate to *financialize* WCO while obscuring its embeddedness in food justice and spiritual economies. The trickster here is the *false dichotomy* between ‘green growth’ and ‘degrowth’: WCO’s potential is being hijacked to *delay* systemic change, just as *jatropha* did in the 2000s. The solution lies in *reclaiming* WCO as a *communal resource*—through cooperatives, sacred economy audits, and aviation demand caps—while confronting the *structural power* of oil traders and airlines that profit from the illusion of transition.