With a measure of caution, Europe joins the biofuel gold rush
By Elisabeth Rosenthal IHT
Monday, May 28, 2007
ARDEA, Italy: A year ago, this lush coastal field near Rome was filled with orderly rows of delicate durum wheat, used to make high quality Italian pasta. Today it overflows with rapeseed, a tall, gnarled weedlike plant bursting with coarse yellow flowers that has become a new manna for European farmers: rapeseed can be turned into biofuel.
Lured by generous new subsidies to develop alternative energy sources - and a measure of concern about the future of the planet - European farmers are plunging into growing crops that can be turned into fuels meant to produce fewer emissions than gas or oil when burned. They are chasing after their counterparts in the Americas who have been cropping for biofuel for more than five years.
"This is a much-needed boost to our economy, our farms," said Marcello Pini, a farmer, standing in front of the sea of waving yellow flowers he planted for the first time this year. "Of course we hope it helps the environment, too."
In March, the European Commission, disappointed by the slow growth of the biofuels industry in Europe, approved a directive that included a "binding target" requiring member states to use 10 percent biofuel for transport by 2020 - the most ambitious and specific goal in the world.
Most EU states are currently far from achieving the target, and are introducing new incentives and subsidies to boost production.
As a result, bioenergy crops have now replaced food as the most profitable crop in a number European countries. In this part of Italy, for example, the government guarantees the purchase of biofuel crops at €22 per 100 kilograms, or $13.42 per 100 pounds - nearly twice the €11-to-€12 rate per 100 kilograms of wheat on the open market last year. Better still, European farmers are allowed to plant biofuel crops on "set-aside" fields, land that EU agriculture policy would otherwise require them to leave fallow to prevent an oversupply of food.
But an expert panel convened by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization this month pointed out that the biofuels boom produces both benefits as well as tradeoff and risks - including higher and wildly fluctuating global food prices. In some markets grain prices have nearly doubled because farmers are planting for biofuels,
"At a time when agricultural prices are low, in comes biofuel and improves the lot of farmers and injects life into rural areas," said Gustavo Best, an expert at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. "But as the scale grows and the demand for biofuel crops seems to be infinite, we're seeing some negative effects and we need to hold up a yellow light."
Josette Sheeran, the new head of the UN World Food program, which fed nearly 90 million people in 2006, said that biofuels created new dilemmas for her agency. "An increase in grain prices impacts us because we are a major procurer of grain for food. So biofuels are both a challenge and an opportunity."
In Europe, the rapid conversion of fields that once grew wheat or barley to biofuel oils like rapeseed is already leading to shortages of ingredients for making pasta and brewing beer, suppliers say. That could translate into higher prices in supermarkets.
"New and increasing demand for bioenergy production has put high pressure on the whole world grain market," said Claudia Conti, a spokesman for Barilla, one of the largest Italian pasta makers. "Not only German beer producers, but Mexican tortilla makers have see the cost of their main raw material growing quickly to quickly to historical highs."
For some experts, more worrisome is the potential impact to low-income consumers from the displacement of food crops by bioenergy plantings. In the developing world, the shift from growing food to growing more lucrative biofuel crops destined for richer countries could create serious hunger and damage the environment in places where wild land is converted to biofuel cultivation, the FAO expert panel concluded.
But officials at the European Commission say they are pursuing a measured course that will prevent the worst price and supply problems that have plagued American markets.
"We see in the United State farmers going crazy growing corn for biofuels, but also producing shortages of food and feed," said Michael Mann, a commission spokesman. "So we see biofuel as a good opportunity - but it shouldn't be the be-all and end-all for agriculture."
In a recent speech, Mariann Fischer Boel, the EU agriculture and rural development commissioner, said that the 10 percent EU target was "not a shot in the dark," but rather carefully chosen to encourage a level of biofuel industry growth that would not produce undue hardship for the Continent's poor. Over the next 14 years, she calculated, it would push up would raw material prices for cereal by 3 percent to 6 percent by 2020, while prices for oilseed may rise between 5 percent and 18 percent. But food prices on the shelves would barely change, she said.
Yet even as the EU program begins to harvest biofuels in greater volume, home-grown production is still far short of what is needed to reach the 10 percent goal: EU farmers produced an estimated 2.9 billion liters, or 768 million gallons, of biofuel in 2004, far shy of the 3.4 billion gallons generated in the United States during the same period. In 2005, Europe was at around 1 percent biofuels use, according to EU statistics, with almost all of that in Germany and Sweden. The share of biofuels used in Italy was 0.51 percent, while in Britain, it was just 0.18 percent.
That could pose a looming threat to the European market as foreign producers like Brazil or developing countries like Indonesia and Malaysia try to ship their own biofuels to where demand, subsidies and tax breaks are the greatest. Indeed, Fischer Boel recently acknowledged that Europe would have to import at least a third of its 10 percent biofuels target - an imperative that EU politicians fear could hamper development of the nascent local industry, while perversely generating tons of new emissions as "green" fuel is shipped thousands of kilometers across the Atlantic, instead of coming from the farm next door.
Such imports could make biofuel far less green in other ways as well - for example if Southeast Asian rainforest is destroyed for cropland.
Brazil, a country with a perfect climate for sugar cane and vast amounts of land, started with subsidies years ago to encourage the farming of sugarcane for biofuels, partly to take up "excess capacity" in its flagging agricultural sector.
The auto industry jumped in too. In 2003, Brazilian automakers started producing flex-fuel cars that could run on biofuels, including locally produced ethanol. Today, 70 percent of new cars in the country are flex-fuel models, and Brazil is one of the largest growers of cane for ethanol. Its agricultural sector no longer requires government assistance.
Analysts are unsure if the Brazilian miracle can be replicated in Europe - or anywhere else. Sugar takes far less energy to convert to biofuel than almost any other product, a key for producing "green fuel."
Yet after a series of alarming reports on climate change this year, the political urgency to move faster is clearly growing.
With an armload of incentives, the Italian government hopes that 70,000 hectares, or 173,000 acres, of land will be planted with biofuel crops this year, and 240,000 hectares in 2010, up from zero last year.
"Yes, grain is our tradition - I agree it is beautiful," said Pini, the farmer. "But you have to look after financial interests too." He has converted about a quarter of his land, or 18 hectares, to the fastest-growing biofuel crop in Europe, rapeseed, which includes his "set-aside" land. He still grows 50 hectares of grain and 7 hectares of olives.
He has discovered other advantages as well: In the finicky Italian food culture, food crops have to look good and be of high quality to be sold, a drought or undue heat can mean an off-year. Crops for fuel, in contrast, can be ugly or stunted. "You need fewer seeds and its much easier to grow," he said. |
