Thursday’s thundering Financial Times editorial on the food crisis unfortunately arrived too late to change opinions on the 13th floor of the Berlaymont, the European Commission nerve centre. The day before the call for a pause in the push for biofuels was made Jose Manuel Barroso, Commission president, defended the policy.
He said the use of crops for fuel had so far had little effect on higher food prices. It can’t be often that the Commission disagrees with its multilateral brethren, the IMF, World Bank and United Nations.
Barroso said the push to increase biofuels to 10 per cent of the EU transport fuel mix by 2020 will continue. In fact, by creating a market for sustainable biofuels the EU could improve their production round the world, he said.
Perhaps he will listen to the EU’s own scientific advisers. On Thursday advisers to the European Environment Agency called for the target to be scrapped.
“The overambitious 10 per cent target is an experiment, whose unintended effects are difficult to predict and difficult to control,” they said.
However, Barroso did warn of a human tragedy caused by high food prices and called on EU countries to lift their giving to affected countries.
The link between the EU policies and food shortagesis beginning to worry some in the Berlaymont. It is seeking to end export subsidies that see cheap food dumped on poor countries. However, there are still many high tariff barriers that prevent poor farmers exporting to the EU. Doubtless this debate will become a centrepiece of the haggling over the mid-term review of the common agricultural policy this year.
France is already talking about the need for “food security” while Franz Fischler, former agriculture commissioner who keeps on top of the issues, told me recently that Europe has a duty to feed itself and the world.
Meanwhile, Andris Piebalgs, the energy commissioner, has been making the case for stimulating investment in farm productivity through the biofuels target.
He wrote in a recent blog post: “Substantial tracts of arable land lie fallow since the collapse of the collective farming system used during Communist times in many of the new Member States. The EU’s ambitious but realistic 10% target will provide the market pull stimulation that these farmers need to face a future market based agricultural economy and less dependence on EU subsidies.”
But with Gordon Brown among others calling for a change of stance, I wouldn’t advise any farmer to start sowing the seeds of biofuel crops until they are sure of exactly what they will reap.
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