EU at odds over biofuels targets

The European commission is sticking to a biofuels target agreed by EU ministers last March, despite clashing comments from its environment chief Stavros Dimas.

"We have received an order from the European council of March 2007," said a spokesman for energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs.

He said that a target binding member states to generate 10 per cent of their transport from biofuels by 2020 will remain "unchanged".

The comments come after environment commissioner Stavros Dimas was quoted in the BBC Monday, saying that it might be wiser to miss the EU target of 10 per cent rather than risk damaging food stocks and the environment.

Green MEP Caroline Lucas said: "Commissioner Dimas’s contradictory statement clearly demonstrates the EU’s mishandling of biofuel policy.

"It not only fails to address the gravity of the problems surrounding agrofuel production – it also makes a mockery of the EU’s legislative processes by dismissing its own targets as irrelevant.

"Large-scale generation of biofuels fails to deliver the environmental guarantees we need at home and risks degrading the land in the south which many rely upon for food.”

On 23 January, the commission will release a proposal on the promotion of the use of renewable energy resources. Piebalgs's spokesman says that it will contain "very strict" environmental criteria for the use of biofuels on the European market.

However, environmental NGOs are not convinced.

"Using crops to produce fuel is a false solution to climate change - the real solutions lie in forcing car companies to produce cleaner cars, improving public transport and making our towns and cities more energy efficient," said Adrian Bebb of Friends of the Earth Europe.

"The EU’s proposed new law to regulate agrofuels will be a disaster for the environment and will heavily impact on the world’s poor.

"An urgent moratorium on setting new targets is the only sensible way forward,” he added.

Biofuels are currently produced from the by-products of traditional food crops, such as palm oil, corn, sugar cane, wheat and oilseed rape.

In the future, so-called second-generation biofuels will be produced from dedicated energy crops like lignocellulose and perennial grasses.

John Bowis, an EPP-ED MEP for Britain, was more positive on the issue, but urged caution. He told the Parliament Magazine:

"Biofuels can be a part of the solution but they can also exacerbate the problem.

"We must make sure that biofuels are sustainable and also move swiftly towards the second generation of biocrops, which use the whole plant.

"It would be a disaster if our rush to biofuels were to accelerate deforestation and habitat loss."

One of the points in the commission's proposal will deal with counting imported biofuels towards each member state's 10 per cent target.

Neil Parish, head of the parliament’s agriculture committee, says that the viability of biofuels lies in ensuring that they are grown close to home.

“While many farmers will naturally want to continue growing crops for food purposes, they may have areas of land available for growing fuel.

"Cutting down the rainforest and digging up food crops when we have a world shortage of food is clearly not the best way to meet the targets.

“If the only way to meet the targets is to import all our biofuels, clearly the supply is as vulnerable as oil or gas."

However, a report released Monday by the Royal Society says that because the UK has only 8.4m hectares of arable and forest land to cultivate, it will be “very unlikely” to achieve fuel security by growing biofuels on its own land and will be required to import products from elsewhere.

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