Peak Food

Jonathan Stearns on Bloomberg.com reported:

“The European Union said Brazil must protect farms and forests at home to try to open biofuel markets abroad, seeking to prevent a clean-air campaign from causing land damage. Brazil, a pioneer in developing biofuels including ethanol, is counting on export growth as Europe, the U.S. and Asia try to reduce the use of higher-polluting oil. The EU wants biofuels, made from crops such as sugar and grain, to make up 10% of transport fuel by 2020 from a planned 5.75% in 2010.

” ‘We can’t allow the switch to biofuels to become an environmentally unsustainable stampede in the developing world,’ EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson told a conference today in Brussels. ‘Europeans won’t pay a premium for biofuels if the ethanol in their car is produced unsustainably by systematically burning fields after harvests. Or if it comes at the expense of rainforests.’

“Mandelson’s remarks highlight the hurdles to expanding international biofuel trade and the risks of scaling back existing environmental rules in Brazil, the biggest producer of ethanol from sugar cane. Last month, billionaire George Soros, an investor in Brazil’s ethanol industry, said environmental regulation in the South American country would prevent it from achieving a potential 10-fold increase in output.

“‘The 27-nation EU plans to set minimum environmental standards for biofuels as part of draft legislation due later this year on achieving the bloc’s 10% target’, said Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs. ‘Only biofuels that meet these norms would count toward the goal of increasing use of the alternative fuels and be eligible for tax breaks,’ he said.

“”It is, of course, essential to ensure that this increase is fulfilled in a sustainable way,’ Piebalgs said. `We cannot just sit back and assume that this will happen automatically.’”