FINANCIAL TIMES: UN URGES RETHINK ON BIOFUEL
The Financial Times reported recently that the world risks deeper poverty and greater environmental damage unless it fundamentally changes its bioenergy strategy, according to the United Nations’ top food and agriculture official Jacques Diouf.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation is pushing for a high-level meeting next June to lay down rules for the international bioenergy market. At present, the bioenergy industry is regulated by domestic policies rather than international agreement.
The FAO is urging the European Union and the US to lower trade barriers against ethanol imports; establish a system for bioenergy environmental standards; and provide more microcredit to farmers in developing countries to develop local biofuels.
Writing in the Financial Times, Jacques Diouf, FAO director general, said: “Such measures would allow developing countries – which generally have ecosystems and climates more suited to biomass production than industrialised nations and often have ample reserves of land and labour – to use their comparative advantage.”
Mr Diouf said the objective of the proposed meeting should be to ensure that bioenergy realised its potential to fuel sustainable growth and reduce hunger.
The US, Europe and Brazil last year accounted for almost 95 per cent of the world’s biofuel production. Canada, China and India produced most of the rest, according to the International Energy Agency, the industrialised countries’ energy watchdog.
Biofuel production, mostly of corn-derived ethanol in the US and rapeseed-derived biodiesel in Europe, doubled between 2000 and 2005, according to the IEA. In 2005, however, that was still just 1 per cent of global road-transport fuel. The energy watchdog forecast that would rise to 4 per cent by 2030. Mr Diouf said the bioenergy sector had a “huge potential to reduce hunger and poverty” if production shifted from rich to poor countries.
The US biofuel industry last year consumed about 20 per cent of the country’s corn crop, far more than in the past. “It is clear that the current practice of relying on food crops to produce fuel will be relatively short-lived,” Mr Diouf said.
(Source: Financial Times)
