Biofuel expansion threatens Europe’s wildlife

Biofuelwatch raised concerns that millions of farm birds could be left without enough food and
breeding sites next spring if plans to scrap Europe’s agricultural land set-aside targets for next year go ahead, warn environmental groups.

Photo: Moss in my garden

Plans to set a zero set-aside targets from October this year have been announced by the EU Commissioner for Agriculture, Mariann Fischer-Boel, as a response to rising food prices. Those plans are to be ratified by ministers this autumn.

Several studies confirm that set-asides have become a vital habitat for many of Europe’s endangered birds and insects, and that farm birds have declined by nearly 50% on average since 1980. Many thousands of people have written to European politicians these last weeks including me (see more here), asking for the plans to be dropped and supporting a moratorium on biofuel targets. More intensively farmed monocultures cannot be part of the solution.

Almuth Ernsting from Biofuelwatch said in their news release: “There is no doubt that the expansion in biofuels is pushing up food prices. The European Union are committed to stopping biodiversity losses by 2010 but those plans will almost certainly make this impossible. Our birds and insects must not be sacrificed for biofuel expansion. We need a moratorium on EU biofuel targets and incentives now – and we need to keep our set asides until they can be replaced with better environmental safeguards.”

Few regard the current set-aside system, as being the ideal instrument for protecting farmland biodiversity, although it provides a safety net for many species. We can hope that a ‘health check’ of the Common Agricultural Policy in 2008 will lead to more targeted environmental safeguards - but we cannot have a sudden scrapping of all set-aside targets without any replacement or reform will devastate bird and insect populations.

Biofuel expansion is already causing rainforest destruction and the displacement of large numbers of communities in the global South. At the same time, poor people are hit hardest by rising food prices whilst Europe burns more and more food in cars. The only logical solution is to suspend biofuel targets, whilst drastically reducing our overall fuel use. As I've said before on this blog we need to be much more careful about support for biofuels - see 9th May 2007 blog entry - our District Council is looking to expand use of these fuels but unless they focus on recycled oils or at the very least local sources we could be seriously adding to problems.

Meanwhile a study, by Dr Righelato, with Dominick Spracklen from the University of Leeds, is the first to calculate the impact of biofuel carbon emissions across the whole cycle of planting, extraction and conversion into fuel. They report in the journal Science that you could save between two and nine times more carbon emissions if you trapped carbon in trees and forest soil rather than replace fossil fuels with biofuels.

Biofuels are presented as an environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuels but there is growing evidence they would actually make climate change worse. The Government is heavily pushing biofuels as the way to tackle road transport emissions (rather than reducing the need to travel) making a commitment (under the Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation – RTFO) for 5% of Britain’s fuels to have a biofuel component. Meanwhile the EU commits all member states to substitute 10% of transport fuel with biofuels by 2020.