Josie Cohen is Campaigns Officer at ActionAid UK and writes about their biofuels campaign:
The controversy surrounding biofuels has been hotting up over the last few weeks, reaching its peak when a comment from a top official within the European Commission was leaked.
Picked up originally by Reuters, the senior official warned that taking full account of the carbon footprint of biofuels would ‘kill’ an EU industry with revenues of approximately $5 billion per year. You would have thought that this revelation would be enough for the EU to put the brakes on the current expansion of biofuel production which, after all, is driven by a desire to lower greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector. When you add this warning to the ever-mounting scientific evidence on the significant emissions from biofuel production given off from land use change and by nitrogen fertilisers then you really start to wonder why policy makers are still pushing ahead with plans that seemed like a really good idea a few years ago but now look like a disaster waiting to happen.
But, as well as not being a solution to climate change – the very problem they were designed to combat – there is another problem with biofuels and this is the reason that ActionAid have recently launched their anti-biofuels campaign. Biofuels cause hunger. They do this by driving up food prices, the real cost of which can be seen in the developing world where many of the poorest households spend up to 80% of their income on food. As a result of this, even a 1% increase in the price of food can destroy a family’s ability to feed themselves.
As well as pushing up food prices, the expansion of industrial biofuels driven by global government targets, subsidies and incentives, is also encouraging biofuel companies to grab land all over the developing world. Local communities are losing the land that they have farmed for generations and that they rely upon for subsistence farming. Wild promises are being made as to expected yields and employment opportunities, but they are all too often broken leaving people with no land, no compensation and therefore no ability to claim their right to food. And all this in a world where 1 billion people already go hungry.
So why have ActionAid chosen this moment to launch their campaign? Well, the UK Government must submit their National Action Plan to the EU in June outlining how it plans to reduce our transport emissions by 10% by 2020. At the moment it looks like they will opt for meeting this target by increasing the amount of biofuels in our petrol and diesel from the current 2.5% to just over 10%. And who could blame them? Biofuels are by far the easiest way to meet this target, much simpler than investing in public transport, increasing the fuel efficiency of car engines, or any of a number of other real solutions. Just one problem: biofuels do not lower greenhouse gas emissions and they could push another 600 million more people into hunger by 2020.
Help the Government to make the right decision by visiting http://www.actionaid.org.uk/biofuels and emailing the Department for Transport to ask them not to lock us into an increased biofuel target.
‘The Independent View‘ is a slot on Lib Dem Voice which allows those from beyond the party to contribute to debates we believe are of interest to LDV’s readers. Please email [email protected] if you are interested in contributing.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
#interrail2025: Day 6 - turning for home... but how?
Two Lib Dem gains in council by-elections
Lochee Park - free family fun day #dundeewestend
Labour failing on social care reform
Photo gallery
Raven (1977) - by the writers of Children of the Stones
Learning from the Zen masters
John Grout
David Evans
Richard Flowers
expats
4 Comments
This is a very complex area, and it’s not helped by the fact that a lot of people speaking loudly in it dont really know what they’re talking about.
Here in Bristol we recently turned down a planing application for a biofuels plant, against legal advice. Rightly so, too! The fuel for it was almost certainly going to be palm oil from the other side of the world – an utterly absurd crop to refine into oil and ship across the world. If palm oil is going to be harvested, it should ideally be burn as whole biomass in-situ, or used in aviation.
Anyhow, that doesnt mean we should start trying to kill the principle of biofuels. Biofuels have incredible potential to be a crucial part of future energy production. We must be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater here. Cellulose biofuels and ocean-grown algal biofuels could be the source of zero carbon aviation fuel and also plastics once the oil runs out.
It’s not true to simply state that biofuels increase food prices either. Biofuels grown in places where nothing was previously growing clearly dont increase food prices. The problem is that (well intentioned) subsidies have led to a perhaps predictable response by big business to cash in in a way that is harmful to food crops and the environment. This is what we need to tackle, ASAP. But let’s not get hysterical, otherwise all we do is give a great big boost to the nuclear industry.
As Mark sort of points out, the food v fuel issue on biofuels only really applies to first generation biofuels. The second generation ones are much better.
There is valid reason for concern regarding biofuels. There is the potential for indirect land use change and problems with competition with food crops. Some technologies fail, ethanol in the USA is not an effective technology as it takes almost as much energy to produce as the ethanol provides. All this means is that biofuels should be implimented with studious caution.
No serious proponent of bio-fuels has suggested they are a magic bullet, they openly admit the shortcommings. They cannot replace fossil fuels without indirect land use change. However they are a good stop-gap measure and with the right checks and balances can make a small but not insignificant contribution during this period when we are weaning ourselves off energy and fossil fuel dependancy. While we still have land set aside to prevent over production of food in Europe, there is still capacity for biofuels to be produced.
Categorising biofuels as a big bad thing that must be stopped is an argument that is over-simplistic in the extreme. Biofuels are not all one and the same- they are a wide and varied set of technologies, from subsistance farmers in the developing world using wood stoves, to anaeobic digestion of the sewage effluent from our major cities.
Second generation biofuels will as likely not be the magic bullet either, but within the limited scope for implementaion they can make a difference.
Well done to Mark and Rankersbo for bringing in a little bit of rational balance to the debate. It does developing communities a disservice that their case is put in such an unnuanced, emotive and over-simplistic way. We need rational and analytical debate not loud and lairy posturing.