www.checkbiotech.org ; www.raupp.info ; www.czu.cz

EU agriculture ministers locked horns on Monday over how Europe should make
greater use of environment-friendly biofuels made locally, while not opening
itself up to a flood of imports from countries like Brazil, February 2006
by Jeremy Smith.

Biofuels, which are made from biomass - organic matter such as wood, waste
material and agricultural crops like cereals and sugar beet - are used to
power vehicles and are widely seen in the EU as a way to reduce emitted
gases that heat the earth.

The EU has set non-binding targets of a 5.75 percent share for biofuels by
2010: a goal that looks set to be missed.

The European Commission has published a plan, being discussed by EU
ministers, to boost biomass production and develop the EU's biofuels market.

Many questions remain to be answered, especially how much the EU might
depend on imports. Although the biofuels debate is still in its early
stages, several countries are worried about the potential impact on their
agricultural production.

Expanding the EU's supply of raw materials, including forestry products, is
seen as crucial to the strategy and might lead to some agricultural policy
changes to ensure that enough cereals, sugar beet and underused alternatives
are available.

Several states, including France, Belgium and Italy, are keen to see high
import tariffs so that the EU can produce much of its own biomass and not
depend too much on buying ethanol from Brazil, the world's leading producer
of the fuel.

"On imports, there's a clear split between the countries. This remains the
most contentious issue," an EU official told reporters following an EU
agriculture ministers? debate on future biofuels policy.

Two camps of EU countries had emerged that saw the way to boost EU biofuels
use in different ways: those happy to see a reasonably high level of
imports, and those that wanted to encourage domestic biofuels production, he
said.

France suggested redefining the technical specifications of some of the EU's
customs product codes to specify the agricultural origin of products like
ethanol. In practice, this would target countries like Brazil which makes
ethanol from sugar cane, not beet - the raw material used by EU producers.

"They (France) would like to make an assessment of the (customs)
nomenclature," the official said. "So if imports (ethanol) were to be
needed, we would set temporary quotas to be reviewed according to EU
demand."

Price concerns

At the same time, other countries like Spain and Portugal have voiced
concern over the impact that higher EU production of biofuels might have on
market prices for cereals and oilseeds.

The EU makes 10 percent of the world's ethanol, using around 1.2 million
tonnes of cereals and 1.0 million of sugar beet in 2004: the equivalent of
0.4 and 0.8 percent of the bloc's overall cereals and sugar output
respectively. The EU, which is the world's leading producer of biodiesel,
used slightly more than 20 percent of its oilseeds production in 2004 to
turn out 4.1 million tonnes of the fuel.

Many of the EU's newest joiners said they want to benefit from a special
subsidy for so-called energy crops that only the countries in the old EU-15
get at present, since it was agreed as part of the EU's mammoth farm reform
in 2003.

The subsidy, known as the "carbon credit" premium, is worth 45 euros
($53.73) per hectare of land sown to crops destined for non-food purposes.
It applies up to a ceiling of 1.5 million hectares, an area that many EU
governments want to see increased.

Since it was introduced, there has been a large take-up of the carbon credit
subsidy - it was awarded for 300,000 hectares in 2004 and more than 500,000
hectares in 2005.

[www.planetark.com]

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