Europe’s Food Supply Not At Risk From Biofuels – EU

Europeans should not fear a fall in food supplies caused by the European Union’s ambitious targets for using biofuels in transport fuels, the EU’s executive Commission said on Monday.

Last year, EU leaders agreed to get 10 percent of all transport fuel from biofuels by 2020 to help fight climate change. Ministers are now debating how to reach the goal and avoid trade-offs such as diverting land from food production.
Concern over meeting the biofuels targets has fuelled fears that sky-high food prices, which have already led to riots in developing countries, may rise even further if fertile arable land in Europe is turned over to growing “energy crops”. “We see that we don’t have an enormous danger of too much of a shift away from food production towards biofuels production,” European Commission agriculture spokesman Michael Mann told a daily news briefing.

“We have increasing yields, we are getting rid of set-aside,” he said, referring to a longstanding EU system of farmers compulsorily leaving a certain amount of land fallow each year. That amount has already been set at zero for this harvest and is scheduled for abolition, if EU ministers agree.

“We have the move towards second-generation (biofuels) … and we also have in a number of the new member states … huge amounts of land that have previously been unplanted. This can be brought into production,” he said.

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