News Land Grabbing / Agrofuels May / June 2013

 

 

 

The European Council – Discussion on the Proposal of the European Commission revising the Biofuel Policy

 

The last European Council meeting produced very little progress on the Commission proposal, which seeks to limit the use of agrofuels in the EU with only The Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Denmark expressing support for the Commission proposal, while countries Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland were against the proposal. However, the majority of countries did not take a clear position on the issue; at this point the Council seemed deadlocked. The Council has planned several meetings on the issue. However, positions are so divergent, that no agreement is likely to come out. This is confirmed by the Irish Presidency, does not expect an agreement on the issue before 2014, when the Greek presidency takes over the lead.

 

However, campaigning and pressure on your national policy-makers can produce results. In the articles below you can see how campaigning from British civil society has contributed to a change of course in British politics on Biofuels. In the most recent articles, the British politicians seem to be convinced of the multiple harmful impacts of biofuels policies and they consider scrapping the mandates for biofuels.  

 

G8 under pressure to rethink biofuel mandates

 

The EU countries and the other G8 countries have com under pressure to revise their biofuel mandates because of their negative impact on food security in developing countries since agrofuel crop plantations compete with food production in hunger-prone countries. According to Barry Johnston of Christian Aid the G8 should recognize biofuel production as a significant factor related to world hunger, since one of structural reasons of world hunger relates to land grabbing which ”in some cases are directly taking food out of the mouths of people and putting into cars in the EU”. Campaigning efforts by Christian Aid under the IF campaign and also the Enough Food for Everyone, have spurred debate on agrofuels. The chairman of the House of Commons’ International Development Committee stressed that because of the overwhelming evidence “biofuels mandates should be scrapped”. Such debates should be commenced in all European national parliaments in order to convince politicians of the necessity to phase-out agrofuels.

 

Full article: here

 

Look & hear what your country said during the European Energy Council meeting

 

Below you can find the links to two more related press articles.

MPs: Ban crop-based biofuels from UK green transport targets

 

UK, EU biofuels targets should be revised, UK lawmakers say