The activists achieved the European commission’s agreement to decrease the content of vegetable oils in fuel till 5%. For the time being the biofuel E10 used in European union contains 10% of bio additives. By 2020 the EU intends to produce biofuel containing 10% of bio and agricultural wastes additives.
The rapidly growing prices for crops made the EU and the USA change their policy connected with biofuel, since these crops could be used as food instead. During the joint press conference on Monday the climate committee man Conniy Hedegart and the special commissioner for energy Giunter Ottinger officially confirmed the plans to decrease the volumes of consumed biofuel.
As soon as it was reported, Kler Koffi, the foreign policy adviser in ActionAid company, said that Euro commission finally made a wise decision because processing valuable food and the usage of agricultural territories are really harmful for people and environment.
The commissioners noted that such policy is not aimed at closing up biofuel production, it only limits its usage till 5% in order to increase the production volume till 10% by 2020, yet this time only nonfood crops will be utilized.
Within the non-official meeting in Cyprus the Ministers of Energy discussed an active biofuel development taking into account that it’s rather difficult to reach a 10% rate by 2020. Ottinger informed that the increase of rape and oat biofuel usage is connected with the development of the second generation biofuel which is quite expensive. However this 5% decrease seems real as the production of bio and acricultural waste biofuel won’t require the devastation of lands and the usage of valuable crops.
At the same time the NGO Oxfam encourages the EU government to support the Euro commission’s initiative and not to pay attention to biofuel producers’ complaints regarding the growth of unemployment when millions of people are starving.
It should be mentioned that Ukraine is directly relevant to this question as it’s is one of the leading rape exporter to Europe. Its sales directly depend on the interest from the European countries for instance from Poland (the leader on Ukrainian rape import, 2011/2012 years – 325 thousand tones), France (230 thousand tones), the Netherlands (168 thousand tones), Belgium (104 thousand tones), Germany (65 thousand tones).
It should also be noted that in 2012 the Ukrainian president endorsed the law about the gradual increase of bioethanol in petrol.
