Biofuel debate deepens

The biofuels debate in the European Union has long been seen as a battle between politicians intent on finding a viable alternative to fossil fuels and campaign groups that claim the creation of biofuels creates potential environment damage, cuts into food production, and may be of limited effect in tackling climate change. But in a move to acknowledge concerns about the increasing complexity surrounding biofuels, a European Union committee voted last month to lower the union's target for using traditional food crops to create biofuels to add to petrol and diesel. The European Parliament's industry committee endorsed the European Commission's proposal that 10 per cent of all road transport fuel should come from renewable sources by 2020. But the panel suggested that at least four per cent of the biofuels should be provided by electricity or hydrogen derived from renewable sources and 'second generation' biofuels, which would largely be sourced from waste vegetation, whole non-crop plants or algae. That would leave just six per cent coming from traditional biofuels made from grains or other food stocks. At the moment around three per cent of the fuel consumed in Europe comes from biofuels. The committee also backed an interim goal of five per cent of road transport fuel from renewable resources by 2015, of which one fifth should not be crop-based biofuels. The original ten per cent biofuel target for road transport came in for a lot of criticism in recent months, with detractors arguing that first generation biofuels, such as ethanol, require the growing of food crops for this purpose. And detractors were also quick to lay part of the blame for recent soaring food prices on the diversion of crops into biofuel. Globally, there is little food crop capacity to spare under current demands. Food prices are partly to blame for adding 75 million people to the world's hungry in 2007, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation said last month. In the same year, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Zigler, called biofuels " a crime against humanity ". His comments followed earlier warnings from Al Gore who said: " The danger with biofuels is that extremely valuable forests will be destroyed unnecessarily. " The EU's proposed mixture of second generation biofuels and fuels from other renewable sources may appear to address the problems highlighted by some environmentalists The European Parliament acted last month to …