April 20, 2007

EU's biofuel policy threatens food production

EU's biofuel policy may soon push poultry producers to import half their cereals, a German researcher said. 

EU's biofule policy, if implemented, would mean that a quarter of the arable land in the region would be devoted to the crops needed for biofuel production, German researcher Hans-Wilhelm Windhorst of the University of Vechta told the International Egg Commission conference in London recently.

The EU aims to increase biofuel usage in cars five-fold by 2010.

Half the biofuel would be imported while the other half would be produced domestically.

This means about 8.25 million hectares of land would have to be devoted to biofuels.

Prof Windhorst said that by 2030 a land area of 36m hectares (89m acres), or about a third of the total arable land in the EU, would have to be used for growing biofuel crops to meet the expanded usage by then.

This would have a huge impact on food production, he pointed out.

However, the area needed could be lowered by using new technologies to produce biofuels. Still, he said the belief that biofuels would be more environmentally friendly is highly questionable, given the fact that almost any other alternative would require agricultural land to grow from.