What do seriously threatened Red Colobus monkeys, high animal feed prices for West Country livestock farmers and a 10 billion euros subsidy have in common? The answer, surprisingly enough, is biofuels.
More specifically, it’s what are known in the jargon as ‘first generation’ biofuels. These are crops such as wheat, sugar and oil seed rape that don’t end up on your plate, but instead are burnt as fuel in our cars. Other crops, like jatropha berries, are grown specifically for energy.
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In East Africa the habitat on which the Red Colobus monkey depends is under threat from developers who want to plant jatropha berries for biodiesel
Sounds great doesn’t it – grow your own fuel. No more worries about running out of oil or gas. Happiness, prosperity and long life for all. Trouble is, it’s not playing out that well.
It turns out that growing crops to turn into fuel has huge environmental consequences, because every acre you use to grow fuel means an acre somewhere else to be taken to grow food, even if that means cutting down forests or ploughing up grasslands. In East Africa, to give just one example, the habitat on which the Red Colobus monkey depends is under threat from Canadian developers who want to destroy the last patches of its woodland home to plant vast fields of jatropha berries to turn into biodiesel. Which, by the way, is pretty much as polluting as plain old white-sliced diesel.
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But that’s just one problem with biofuels. There are more.
Here in Europe, an increasing proportion of our crop production is going to make biofuels. You may wonder about the fundamental sustainability of a system that requires farmers to import cereals to feed cattle in the first place, but burning the stuff can only make the situation worse. Under the logic of supply and demand, this policy is raising the cost of feeds and this makes livestock farming, especially in places such as the South West, even harder. This is a sector that is already struggling with a squeeze of prices at the farmgate and the awful effects of disease, particularly bovine TB.
But it’s not just feed prices that are going up; it’s food prices too, both domestically and around the world. And when food prices go up globally, it’s always the poorest that are hit the worst.
There’s a lot of talk nowadays about food security and every square inch of available land being used to “feed the world”. There are some that say this is a cover for those who wish to push for more intensive farming. Whether that’s the case or not, it certainly doesn’t square with arable farmers selling crops to burn in our cars. It also leads to some fascinating anomalies. Europe used to be self-sufficient in oil seed rape for food used as vegetable oil, but now we import it because all the oilseed rape we grow is used for biodiesel. Where does that leave food security?
And the 10 billion Euros handout the biofuels industry gets every year? Well, that’s about eight-and-half billion quid. About the same cost as the London Olympics. It seems a lot of money but surely using public money to support an industry which helps reduce carbon emissions is a good thing? Well it would be but the snag is that the science is telling us very clearly that, sadly, the biofuels we use now are not achieving that goal. This is the real scandal. European taxpayers, you and me, are paying to subsidise an industry that is environmentally damaging, makes livestock farming in the West Country more difficult, drives up food prices, leads to food insecurity and threatens the good old Red Colobus with elimination!
All is not lost, however. A vote in the European Parliament on July 11 came down narrowly in favour of a cap on the use of food crops of biofuels.
The Business Green website reports that MEPs in the influential Environment Committee voted 43-26 – with one abstention – to set a cap for fuels made from food crops at 5.5 per cent and include emissions arising from indirect land use change factors such as clearing of forests, wetlands or grasslands in the Renewable Energy Directive and the Fuel Quality Directive when calculating official emissions impacts. The biofuels industry criticised the decision but green groups agree that it is a step in the right direction.
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Article source: http://www.thisissomerset.co.uk/Fuelling-monkey-s-demise/story-19533838-detail/story.html