Brussels blog

It doesn’t usually take long before the glitz of a European Union summit rubs off. Commitments signed up to amid a fanfare of rhetoric quickly become tarnished. There was a fascinating glimpse behind the shiny green paintwork of the target of sourcing 20 per cent of energy from renewable targets this week – and it wasn’t pleasant. The Guardian newspaper got hold of a government memo showing British bureaucrats are already looking for ways to erase what their leaders signed up to in March. They are lobbying governments and senior Commission officials for a “flexible” interpretation of whatever individual target the UK is assigned, so they can build solar farms in Africa or count nuclear generation. Investing in renewable sources at home is just too expensive.

It would be understandable if the Brits, like the poorer eastern Europeans, had tried to sabotage the idea from the outset. But instead Tony Blair, burnishing his green credentials, welcomed it.

Another "groundbreaking, bold" commitment (Mr Blair’s words), to source 10 per cent of transport fuels from plants by 2020, looks every bit as ugly.

Once again, the real haggling about “flexibility” has yet to be done. Since turning plants into fuel requires energy in the first place there are big differences over how to measure the amount on carbon produced by biofuels. That is something numbercrunchers in Brussels and national capitals are trying to measure.

There is also the question of how to account for the cutting down of forests to plant biofuel crops. And should the transport to Europe be included?

Europe’s farmers, who want a piece of the action, will be pushing hard for tough standards on imports. But even rosy scenarios suggest they cannot produce all the estimated 30m tonnes of vegetable oil that will be needed annually by 2020. The Commission’s agriculture directorate recently forecast that around a fifth would need to be imported – and that relies on breakthrough technologies that use organic waste as well as plants becoming commercially viable.

While World Trade Organisation rules forbid discriminating against products on environmental grounds, the Commission has made it clear that only fuels meeting its standards will attract.

Its own standards will be limited but individual countries are drawing up more stringent ones. Since only fuels that meet them will be eligible for subsidies and without subsidies palm oil is unlikely to be competitive with petrol. The Dutch are farthest ahead. Germany’s standard is set to be the most draconian, assuming that every hectare displaces something else, resulting in more rainforest being chopped down to grow food. 

The industry itself is likely to draft its own standard in November at a meeting of the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil, which groups companies and non-governmental organisations.

Yet unlike with renewables, the EU’s fate is not in its own hands. Even some producers say that food must come before fuel. Malaysia, the world’s biggest palm oil producer, recently imposed a cap on exports to make sure there were enough supplies for cooking oil and margarine. Peter Chin, the commodities minister, recently visited Europe to make the case for Malaysian fuel. But he said there is a limit: “We had to take a decision with the jump in the EU’s fuel requirements. Only 6m tonnes of our production will be diverted to the production of fuel so as not to jeopardise our food industry.

“Each country will have to take its own decision,” he said. “The priority has to be food. We can get fuel from other sources,”

Malaysia grows about 16m tonnes of palm oil a year and the figure is rising rapidly as yields improve. Mr Chin admitted that Malaysia was felling some virgin forest for palm plants. However, he said most of the upsurge in planting was on farmland that had traditionally left fallow and improved yield through new varieties and fertilisers.

However, industry figures say it would be hard to enforce the export cap in a free global market where the rewards in the US and EU were so much higher.

So can the EU avoid the logging of forests, starving peasants and still hit its targets without breaking the bank? History shows that if anything is to give, it may well be the target.