Can the local energy momentum conservation laws be derived solely from field equations?

The vanishing of the divergence of the matter stress-energy tensor for general relativity is a particular case of a general identity, which follows from the covariance of the matter Lagrangian in much the same way as (generalized) Bianchi identities follow from the covariance of the purely gravitational Lagrangian. This identity, holding for any covariant theory of gravitating matter, relates the divergence of the stress tensor with a combination of the field equations and their derivatives. One could thus wonder if, according to a recent suggestion [A. J. Accioly et al., Classical Quantum Gravity 14 (1997), no. 5, 1163--1166], the energy-momentum tensor for gravitating fields can be computed through a suitable rearrangement of the matter field equations, without relying on the variational definition. We show that this can be done only in particular cases, while in general it leads to ambiguities and possibly to wrong results. Moreover, in nontrivial cases the computations turn out to be more difficult than the standard variational technique.