In this post, I ask what the implications of the outcome of the Durban UNFCCC climate conference might be for EU farming and agricultural policy.

Agriculture and EU emission targets – where we stand

Agriculture is included in the accounting for the EU’s Kyoto Protocol emission reduction targets for the period 2008-2012 and in the Climate and Energy Package (CEP) 2020 target of a 20% reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions over the 1990 base year.

How farming might be affected by these targets is up to the individual member states to decide. There are no agriculture-specific targets at EU level. Agricultural emissions contribute just under 10% to total EU emissions, but what counts in measuring the potential contribution required from agriculture to the EU targets is its contribution to total non-ETS emissions.

Member states have individual non-ETS emission targets under the Effort Sharing Directive and the contribution of agriculture to non-ETS emissions also differs by member state. Ireland, for example, is in the highest band for non-ETS emission reductions (-20% by 2020 compared to 2005 levels) and also has a uniquely high share of its non-ETS emissions derived from agriculture. Its 2020 non-ETS target is 37.4 Mtonnes of CO2eq, and agricultural emissions on the business-as-usual scenario are expected to amount to 18.9 MTonnes of CO2eq in 2020, or exactly 50% of the non-ETS target. Clearly, measures to ensure that Ireland meets the EU targets over the 2013-2020 period will find it difficult to ignore agriculture. Similar challenges will arise in other member states if to a lesser extent.

Moving to a 30% reduction target

These challenges would be added to if the EU decided to increase the level of ambition of its 2020 target as a number of member states would like. The European Council in Spring 2007 conditionally offered, as part of a global and comprehensive agreement for the period beyond 2012, to move to a 30% emission reduction by 2020 compared with 1990 levels, provided that other developed countries commit themselves to comparable emission reductions and that developing countries contribute adequately according to their responsibilities and respective capabilities.

Although the European Parliament has called for the EU to unilaterally adopt the 30% target, EU Environment Ministers meeting in June this year failed to agree to this commitment, with Poland in particular voicing its opposition.

LULUCF

Agricultural emissions only include direct emissions from agricultural activities (mainly enteric fermentation, agricultural soil management, and rice cultivation). Land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) activities also contribute to emissions, either as sources or sinks. Under the UNFCCC reporting requirements, countries are required to report net emissions from all LULUCF activities.

However, for the purposes of the Kyoto Convention targets in the first commitment period (2008-2012), it was mandatory to include only a limited sub-set of LULUCF activities in the commitment targets (only greenhouse gas fluxes associated with deforestation, afforestation and reforestation have to be included in national accounts for emissions reduction target setting purposes. This requirement is set out in Article 3 paragraph 3 of the Protocol). Other LULUCF activities (including emissions attributable to land use management change, such as forest management, grazing land management or crop land management may be voluntarily accounted for, see Article 3 paragraph 4 of the Protocol) but the EU chose not to do so.

For the purposes of accounting for the EU 2020 target, greenhouse gas emissions and removals related to LULUCF activities are currently not included in the EU 2020 target. The Climate and Energy Package requires the Commission to assess ways of counting LULUCF towards the EU’s reduction commitment and, depending on its findings, to make a legislative proposal. A public consultation is currently underway on whether emissions and removals of greenhouse gases related to LULUCF should be covered by the EU’s target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to 20%, or, if the conditions are right, to 30% below 1990 levels by 2020.

Against this background, the agreements reached at the Durban meeting of the UNFCCC Committee of the Parties (COP 17), which included the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action, are likely to have three immediate impacts for the role of agriculture in the EU’s emission reduction strategy. In addition, the decision to continue discussions on agriculture and climate change under the ‘cooperative sectoral approaches and sector-specific actions’ heading of the Long-Term Cooperative Action track of the Convention may have importance in the longer term.

30% emissions reduction target by 2020

The conference outcome launched a process to develop an agreed outcome with legal force that will be applicable to all Parties to the UN climate convention. The decision states that this process shall raise levels of ambition in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The new instrument is to be adopted by 2015 and be implemented from 2020. The EU Climate Change Commissioner has stated that this agreement meets the EU’s key goal at the Durban conference.

However, whether it means that the EU will now proceed to raise its domestic target to a 30% reduction seems unclear. A roadmap is not the same as the eventual agreement, and it seems doubtful that the Durban outcome alone meets the criteria set out in the European Council decision of December 2009 for raising the target. Only if an agreement is successfully negotiated by 2015 would these criteria be met. However, the EU Council could decide, to avoid bunching the additional emission reductions into the final five years of the target period, that it was going to adopt the higher target immediately, at least on a pro tem basis. This would require some change in member state positions from those adopted at the Environment Council meeting in June 2011.

Extension of the Kyoto Protocol to second commitment period

In Durban it was formally decided that a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol will run from 1 January 2013, thus avoiding a gap at the end of the first commitment period finishing next year. Parties’ quantified targets for reducing emissions, as well as rules governing the carryover of surplus emission rights from the first commitment period, will be decided at the end of next year. It is unclear whether the next commitment period will run to 2017 or to 2020. Presumably, the EU will propose whatever domestic targets it decides as discussed in the previous section as its KP targets. These targets should be communicated to the UNFCCC by 1 May next year, so any decision on the 30% target must be made by then.

LULUCF rules

The EU must still decide what to do with LULUCF activities in its carbon accounting. Assuming that its KP targets for the period to 2020 are the same as its domestic targets under the Climate and Energy Package, then the accounting rules should be the same. Under the KP Article 3(3), as we saw above, net emissions from forestry land use change since the base year in 1990 must be included in the KP accounting. This therefore implies that they should also be included in assessing progress towards the CEP 2020 targets. As including LULUCF in the accounting will add offsets to the gross emissions in other sectors, this would make the existing 20% reduction target less ambitious.

In addition, new rules on forestry management in the case of pre-1990 forests in accounting for KP targets were approved as part of the Durban package. Whether the EU would wish to go further and also make mandatory accounting from other land use management activities is less certain, given the continuing doubts about monitoring and verification and the permanence of soil carbon stored as a result of land use management changes.

The new forest management rules were hotly contested at Durban. While the EU claims that the new rules will improve the Protocol’s environmental integrity, many developing countries and NGOs disagree. The new rules allow anticipated future ‘business as usual’ emissions, based on current policy settings, as their baseline for accounting purposes. In other words, even if actual emissions from ‘forest management’ increase as anticipated, they would be accounted for as ‘zero’. If emissions growth is greater than anticipated, the accounts would show a negative value and an accounting debit would result. However, if actual growth in emissions turned out to be less than anticipated, their accounts would show a positive value — despite the fact that emissions had actually increased. Countries will be able to claim windfall accounting credits for not having done as badly as intended (I have taken this paragraph from a useful briefing by the Humane Society International in Australia).

This decision – some would call it a loophole – would add further to the offsets possible when bringing LULUCF into its 2020 target accounting and thus also affect the relative stringency of any target adopted, with knock-on implications for agriculture.

In a separate decision, the UNFCCC Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice has been requested to initiate a work programme to explore more comprehensive accounting of anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks from land use, land-use change and forestry, including through a more inclusive activity-based approach or a land-based approach, and to report back at the next session. Thus the rules governing LULUCF could undergo a further change as a result of this exercise.

Longer term perspectives

In the longer term, the negotiations on how agriculture should be treated in the ‘sectoral approaches’ section of the LCA track could be significant. There appeared to be agreement on a draft text at the Copenhagen COP in 2009, but since then developing countries have hardened their attitude and three optional texts went forward to Durban from the preparatory Panama meeting. Although no agreement on a separate work programme on agriculture was reached, the COP’s Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action (LCA) concluded that a decision on agriculture will be made at COP18 which takes place November 2012 in Qatar. Apparently this is the first time that the UNFCCC adopts a decision on agriculture. The critical issue is how to square the circle between reducing agriculture’s carbon footprint and yet ensuring that food production can continue to increase to meet the growth in expected food demand by 2050 and beyond. This raises the issue whether there might be a different accounting treatment for agricultural emissions in an agreement which includes legally binding commitments by both developed and developing countries.

The issue of carbon leakage has been indirectly addressed by discussions on the trade implications of any domestic measures designed to curb emissions. Developing countries have wanted to include language which would forbid countries from imposing any additional trade restrictions, for example, in the form of border adjustments or labelling requirements, which might act to limit their agri-food exports to developed countries. Developed countries, for their part, have resisted such language, arguing that trade issues are more appropriately dealt with as a cross-cutting issue elsewhere in the negotiations.

Herein lies the importance of the promise in Durban that all countries agree to draw up a legal framework (even the meaning of this term was softened in the final stage of the negotiations to bring India on board) that will involve all countries in making commitments, under the principle of common but differentiated responsibility, to reduce emissions.

A lop-sided world, in which some countries have commitments but others do not, ultimately makes no contribution to reducing emissions. This is demonstrated starkly by the experience of the Kyoto Protocol where Annex 1 countries can meet their commitments by simply out-sourcing their carbon-intensive activities and importing the same goods from emerging economies often produced with energy from highly-polluting coal-fired plants. Overall, there has been no delinking between GDP growth and energy growth at the global level despite the operation of the KP.

Reducing agricultural emissions in Europe only to replace them with potentially higher emissions in other countries has no value from a climate change perspective. The great achievement at Durban (and much of the credit seems to go to the EU Climate Change Commissioner for this success) was to create a perspective where the issue of carbon leakage can be addressed. Turning that promise into reality over the next three years, particularly given the toxic nature of US politics at the moment, will be an even more difficult task.

This post was written by Alan Matthews.
Image associated with the post used under a Creative Commons Licence copyright Keith Evans

The results are unambiguous:

“A global trend emerging from the results is the lower level of emissions per unit of product in intensive compared to extensive systems. This is mainly driven by two factors: the higher digestibility of the animals’ feed, and the higher milk productivity level… However, it is possible that production systems in industrialised countries will experience increasing emissions with intensification, as the marginal reductions in emissions from enteric fermentation may not compensate for the increased emissions from manure, fossil energy and other inputs.” (p. 52).

The results are summarised in this graphic taken from the report. Total LCA emissions are broken down between production, deforestation and processing, although in all regions production is the largest single component. Western Europe, which is the largest producer of milk, is ranked only in third place as a producer of emissions.

Estimated GHG emissions per kg of standardised milk averaged over regions and the world

There are two implications from these results. The first, given the challenge of almost doubling global food production by 2050 from a 2000 base (70% increase over 2006), is the importance of efficiency improvements in helping to offset the additional GHG emissions we would otherwise expect from higher food production. Agricultural production is highly carbon intensive. The IPCC has reported that agriculture is responsible for over a quarter of anthropogenic GHG emissions, but accounts for only about 4 per cent of global GDP. Agricultural intensification, including but not only through the use of transgenic varieties, has a vital role in limiting the carbon footprint of more food production. A recent ICTSD paper by Tybbert and Sumner discusses the range of agricultural technologies open to developing countries to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

The second consequence has relevance to the debate on carbon leakage where EU agriculture is faced with a carbon price (either a tax or cap and trade system or regulations to limit emissions). Farm groups object to this in part because, in the absence of any measures to tackle consumption, such measures could lead to the displacement of EU production to third countries which are less carbon efficient (the issue of carbon leakage). As limiting the total amount of carbon emitted to the atmosphere is the main objective, such a consequence would clearly be nonsensical. At the same time, the option of excluding EU agriculture from efforts to meet the EU’s global carbon reduction commitments is not a satisfactory option either. One way to resolve this conundrum is to impose border tax adjustments on imports from third countries deemed not to be making an adequate effort to limit emissions, but the use of trade measures as part of carbon policy remains highly controversial.

1. Climate change is of great concern for the future competitiveness of EU agriculture and this challenge is being dealt with at all levels. While the framework is set at EU level, implementation will need to be carried out at farm level.

What should be the role of the EU regarding mitigation and adaptation in agriculture, and, in particular, what should be the key areas of cooperation?

2. An instrument in handling climate change in the agricultural sector is rural development programmes. While climate change is already one of the Community priorities for the current programming period, additional funds were provided that can be targeted to climate relevant actions.

How are these opportunities best utilised and are there any early lessons to be learned?

3. One of many consequences of the changing climate is the increased presence of pathogens and diseases. This is likely to be a main concern for crop, livestock and, at worst, human health. The economic consequences for the sector may be substantial.

How could we further develop our common policy and strategies to best meet the challenges of a changed pattern of dissemination of pathogens and diseases?

What recommendations would readers make to the assembled Ministers?

Part of the difficulty in answering this question is that there is not yet an agreed methodology for measuring the carbon emissions of a particular foodstuff. Supermarkets in some countries have begun to experiment with carbon labels which purport to give consumers some idea of the carbon footprint of the product they are buying. However, in many cases these measurements are limited to the distance travelled by the product from farm to shop – so-called food miles.

It is by now well established that food miles are a misleading indicator of a product’s carbon footprint (The UK DEFRA commissioned a useful report on this issue in 2005). Not only is distance itself just one of the many inputs which determine the overall carbon footprint – for example, it makes a huge difference whether the transport is by sea or by air – but the energy used in transporting the final product has been shown to be a relatively small part of the overall energy input (and therefore carbon emissions) required for its production.

From the relatively small number of studies completed to date, it appears that in some cases – cut flowers from Kenya and lamb from New Zealand exported to the UK – EU production requires more energy than its overseas competitors.

This may not always be the case, however. If expanding beef production in developing countries requires deforestation to create more pasture land, then on a life cycle analysis basis grassland beef production in the EU may be much more carbon efficient.

I wonder if a synthesis article yet exists which summarises the state of knowledge on this issue?

The Group comprises representatives from the UK statutory conservation, countryside and environment agencies and aims to advise on policy matters of common concern related to agriculture, woodlands and other rural land uses. It wants to progressively transform the CAP so that it is focused more clearly on rewarding the environmental services arising from land management where the market fails to do so. These rewards should reflect the services provided and the costs incurred. The new policy should in the Group’s view:

• Have a clear role in mitigating and adapting to climate change, addressing water and biodiversity management and ensuring that farming and forestry have the capacity to deliver environmental security and sustainable production in the long term.

• Promote the sustainable use of the natural resources on which all production depends through the use of good practice guidance together with agreed environmental standards, enforced by risk-based regulation which is binding on all land managers.

• Reward the positive management of existing biodiversity, cultural landscapes, carbon and water resources whilst securing improvements in the environmental quality of all rural land.

• Help reduce the environmental footprint of agriculture and forestry, by targeting capital investment on environmentally beneficial technology and infrastructure.

• Integrate sustainable land management with economic and social policy in order to encourage integrated land use that enables rural communities to benefit from the economic potential of their environment.

• Ensure that progress towards environmental, social and economic objectives is monitored, evaluated and regularly reported on.

The group admits that,

‘Transforming the CAP in this way will take time. Any income support retained in the short term should be targeted, with conditions, on those farming systems making the greatest contribution to the management of environmental services for the benefit of society. Research and development should be focused on the challenge of enhancing long-term productivity in ways that reduce environmental impacts and help adapt to climate change.’

The Group states, ‘We see our proposals as providing a sustainable justification for a “new contract” between predominantly urban taxpayers and those who manage rural land.’ It will be interesting to learn more about the proposals when they become available. The principles are good ones, but to an extent the devil is in detail.

There is also the political problem of overcoming the resurgence of support for productionist solutions, the argument being advanced that protecting the environment is a luxury good that can be set aside in a recession. As evidence accumulates about the effects of climate change and their possible acceleration, future agriculture and rural policy must embed measures to mitigate climate change as a key priority.

Whereas carbon dioxide emissions have increased 31 per cent over the past 250 years, methane, which has a higher warming potential and a longer atmosphere lifetime than carbon dioxide has increased by 149 per cent over that time. Dr Thorpe commented that

‘Methane emission growth … has been increasing exponentially in the developing world due to a rise in incomes leading to an increased demand for meat and the “hamburger connection” where developing countries make a lucrative profit supplying meat to developed countries.’

Attempts to curb animal methane emissions have included feeding grazing animals on cottonseed and alfalfa, using food additives, and vacinnating animals with drugs, but it is not clear if they will work on a large scale. A reduction in the amount of livestock kept for meat and milk would only put pressure on other food sources, such as cereals.

Animal methane emissions from developing countries have increased to 75 per cent of the global total, with India and Brazil in the lead. It is thought that atmospheric methane is responsible for one-fifth of the global warming since 1750.

Cows, sheep, goats and camels have an additional stomach and produce large amounts of methane as they digest their food. A dairy cow in New Zealand will typically produce around 80kg of methane a year, just through burping.

The policy pressures this produces is shown by complaints from the Irish Dairy Industries Association that the Republic’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is piling further economic pressure on the country’s beleaguered dairy industry. It was argued that because Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHG)were closely linked to methane from cattle, a 20 per cent cut in GHG emissions would result in a 20 per cent cut in Ireland’s dairy herd.

The association complained that there is no international standard for measurement of emissions from enetric fermentation in cattle. The background to these concerns is a sharp drop in prices from 40 cents a litre in 2007 to around 24 now.

Vegetarians would no doubt argue that the GHG emissions of cattle reinforce the case for not eating meat. In practice, it is difficult to see how the problem can be tackled given that the livestock sector is under heavy economic pressure.

Focusing on the period 2003/05 to 2013/15, the study foresees that the EU will switch from being a net exporter of grains to a net importer, while its import deficit in oilseeds will increase. The principal reason for the changes in the net trade position is the significant growth in domestic demand for bio-energy production.

An aside in the study is what it projects for organic food production in Europe. Noting that organic food production requires more acreage than conventional farming, it observes that the growth in the area devoted to organic production has been slowing down and that sustained high prices for food in general will contribute to a further slow-down in this market segment.

A video presentation by Professor Harald von Witzke summarising the report can be found at the following two YouTube links
Humboldt report on global market trends Part 1

Humboldt report on global market trends Part 2

Group one: Agriculture as a driver of growth and development

1. What are the prospects for local production in a global marketplace?
2. Can family farms provide jobs for young people?
3. How can agriculture contribute to the protection of the environment?

Group two: Regional and global governance

4. What are the challenges in North-South relations, what new forms of agriculture partnerships?
5. What are the roles for producer organisations in managing markets?
6. What international regulation is needed to balance the interests of the world’s farmers?

The website is in French only at the moment, for non-French speakers, Google’s sometimes haphazard machine translated version might be useful.

As well as launching websites, Michel Barnier, the French agriculture Minister, has been leading a media offensive over the past few weeks in advance of the French EU Presidency, and has been offering some answers to his questions. His interview with the Financial Times makes interesting reading, as does the FT’s firm riposte on its leader page. We can safely ignore Barnier’s views about Africa needing its own CAP. Such madness ought to be considered an extreme outlier position, at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from the UK Government’s tactically naive vision paper of December 2005.

More interesting is Barnier’s idea that EU food quality and safety standards will be “the new policy of European preference”. Remember, President Sarkozy has spoken in vague terms in favour of Community Preference, aka ‘Fortress Europe’. Maybe now we are beginning to see the details. This approach has long been suspected as a way of squaring the circle of making EU agriculture globally competitive while keeping standards high. Simply use high EU standards as a way of keeping out competition while continuing to export high value European wine, spirits, processed meats and cheeses. The concept is particularly relevant for the EU’s trading partners. More advanced developing countries like Thailand and Brazil generally have few problems meeting new EU standards. Indeed many of the livestock operations in these countries are actually run by European companies, or with significant EU investment. However, earlier this year we did see the Irish farm lobby successfully lobby for a ban on Brazilian beef on the grounds that Brazil doesn’t meet EU traceability rules (nothing to do with Brazil being Ireland’s main competitor in the bottom end of the beef market, naturally). Where this ‘new policy of European preference’ will really hurt is in the least developed countries, especially in Africa. These countries lack the infrastructure and systems to comply with every last letter of EU traceability and food production rules, although a substantial boost in investment might help them catch up. Everything But Arms has removed the tariffs, but have they been replaced by a new wall of non-tariff barriers?

The non-tariff barrier approach is not entirely new. Long-running disputes over poultry and beef with the US are motivated – at least in part – by a desire to protect domestic producers from competition. The EU has long sought to get its Geographic Indications accepted into the WTO as a form of intellectual property with worldwide legal protection. With tariffs set to tumble if the DDA is concluded, there are no doubt those who feel that ‘Community Preference 2.0′ is the way forward.

Meantime, a report in the FT last week hints that Germany and France are looking towards making a long-term deal to protect the CAP budget beyond 2013. At a meeting in Brussels last week, a senior official from the German agriculture ministry treated the audience to a spirited defense of the CAP. The official argued that the CAP was doing a great job and that it would be rash to tamper with it. The Schroder-Chirac deal on CAP spending killed off any hope of substantial reform of the CAP before 2013. That deal was ostensibly made to allow for EU enlargement (and in the process swindle the ten new member states by giving them very small shares of CAP direct payments). Now the suspicion is, as one seasoned Brussels hand aptly puts it,

“France will help Germany in killing higher EU emission standards for cars and Germany will help France kill CAP reform. Peace and harmony across the continent.”

These kinds of back-room deals are always murky, and this one appears especially unsavory. Franco-German stitch-ups might have been the way things worked in the EU of 10 or 15. Today’s EU of 27 should not stand for them.

There is no doubt that the ‘food crisis’ is putting wind into the sails of those who would like return the CAP to its productionist roots: paying farmers public money to produce more food. Environmentalists, arguably the single most powerful group within the very loose CAP reform coalition of the past few years, are suddenly on the back foot. An early example is the abandonment of compulsory set-aside without any real flanking policies to secure the environmental benefits that are a by-product of leaving land fallow. Development advocates, another important group within the CAP reform coalition, are in a pickle because their longstanding critique of EU export dumping no longer make so much sense when the problem is suddenly that world food prices are too high, not that they are too low.

The solution to what is best described as a ‘food affordability crisis’ is not more subsidy-driven intensification of European agriculture. With water supplies and ecosystems critical to agriculture (e.g. pollinating insects) already under strain, the CAP should prioritise the long-term conservation of European natural resources. As Ariel Brunner of BirdLife International argues, it’s not our ability to produce enough food now that’s the problem, it’s our ability to produce enough food in several decades time, with climate change and population growth putting ever greater strain on the land. In the context of the current crisis, the very short term the solution is a big increase in funding for the World Food Programme. The heart of the problem is that poorer developing countries have agricultural systems that have barely made it into the 19th century, let alone the 21st century. And farm protectionism practiced by the EU, the US and Japan shares a part of the responsibility for this. Raising farm productivity in sub-Saharan Africa must be the priority, but this takes time. What is needed is investment in irrigation, transportation and credit to allow the purchase of the basics: seeds, machines and fertilizers. Reducing barriers to trade between developing countries is also important, although many countries suffering the pinch of high food prices are dropping their tariffs like hot potatoes. If this is what Barnier means when he talks about a CAP for Africa, then all well and good, but I suspect he is really advocating a disastrous policy aim of regional self-sufficiency and new barriers to trade.

A sustained period of higher food prices will provide a market incentive for this investment. Public policy can help prime the pump, and ensure that the transition from a low price/low productivity/low output agriculture to a low price/high productivity/high output agriculture is made as rapidly as possible, with as little time spent in the transitional high price/low productivity/low output phase. In the meantime, any subsidies aimed at averting hunger should focus on increasing the buying power of the urban and landless poor and not suppressing prices by legislation or export controls.

To come back to the French government’s question, the world can feed itself, but we need to work together and keep trading together.

You can listen online to an interview with several of one the study’s authors Tim Searchinger, Joe Fargione, Jason Hill, and German Marshall Fund Transatlantic Fellow Dan Morgan.

[audio:http://web.gmfus.org/mp3s/20080207Biofuels.mp3]

Searchinger et al say that the reason for the current boom in subsidy-driven biofuels production is that governments have calculated the carbon benefits of biofuels compared to fossil fuels without measuring the carbon costs in terms of land use change. Clearing virgin tropical rainforest to grow biofuels results a ‘carbon debt’ that will not be paid off for many decades. The same is true for bringing back marginal farmland into biofuels cultivation. The authors conclude that the only biofuels that could have a beneficial carbon balance are those derived from waste: agricultural waste, food industry waste or even human waste.

The EU’s much-touted biofuels sustainability criteria are about as useful as a chocolate fireguard, since they will merely result in substitution and displacement of existing food production clearance of new land in its place. Nevertheless, the EU shows no sign of revising its commitment to an ambitious target of 10% biofuels use in transportation fuels. When the facts change, sane people change their minds. The question is, are EU leaders sane?

The only people now cheerleading for biofuels are the farmers, refiners and oil companies who will make money producing them. Every major European environmental NGO is opposed to current biofuels policy, with the exception of WWF. Perhaps it is time to take a look at where WWF gets its money from. After all, he who pays the piper calls the tune.

Links:

Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change

Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt