European Commission | ukwatch.net

Industry Pushes For 25% Agrofuel Target

Ellie Keen — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:41:09 +0000

Despite clear warnings about the impact of agrofuels (commonly referred to as biofuels) on the world food supplies, those within the industry think that Europe’s 10% target is not high enough. They are pushing for a 25% target by 2030 [1] – and some members of the European Commission appear to be listening to what they have to say.

Corporate Europe Observatory attended the launch of the European Biofuels Technology Platform (EBTFP) Strategic Research Agenda and Strategy Deployment Document (SRA & SDD) in Brussels to find out more about how industry is using this important document – it is set to influence future EU spending on agrofuel research – to push for a bigger guaranteed market and the opportunity to boost its profits, to the detriment of the environment and the world’s poor.

What is the EBFTP?

The European Biofuel Technology Platform was set up by the European Commission to look at the future needs of the agrofuel industry, particularly in terms of research. It has around 145 members, mainly from industry, with members from research institutes and just two from NGOs.[2] The Platform receives funding from the Commission.

It is, in effect, a descendant of the Advisory Research Council for Biofuels (BIOFRAC) and continues its work. BIOFRAC’s chair, Anders Roj of Volvo, together with the vice chairs were asked to work with the European Commission to select members for EBFTP’s steering committee.[3]

The Platform represents a range of industries interested in agrofuels – from car makers to biotech companies. The steering committee was chaired by Luis Cabra from the oil and gas giant Repsol, which is developing ambitious plans for agrofuels in co-operation with Bunge and Acciona. In January this year he handed over to another oil company rep, Véronique Hervouet from oil company Total.

Five Working Groups, drawn from interested players from the world of industry and research, were set up to develop the research agenda (SRA). Drawing on BIOFRAC’s agenda, they have taken the proposal for a 25% target – originally put forward by BIOFRAC – as their overall aim.

Their draft proposals were published online for a brief public consultation and some 600 responses were submitted, Birger Kirkow from EBFTP’s secretariat explained to stakeholders that these had been taken into consideration “where appropriate”. In reality very little of substance changed at all.

Technology Platforms

Technology
Platforms like the EBFTP, were set up by Science and Research Commissioner Janez Potočnik to allow industry to influence research and development priorities on strategic issues. They play an important role in developing European research policy and are seen as a way of ensuring that Seventh Research Framework Programme (ie EU public-funded research) better meets the needs of industry.

The EBFTP, which is the youngest of all the technology platforms dealing with agrofuels, sees its role as in building “synergies” with others platforms, such as the Forest-Based Sector Technology Platform (FTP), the Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology Platform (HFP), the European Road Transport Research Advisory Council (ERTRAC), and the Biotechnology Platform (Plants for the Future) – creating a “knowledge based bio economy”.

This move towards industry-driven research fits in with the European Union’s Lisbon Agenda, which aims to make Europe “the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world.” Priority is being given to research into new areas of industry – with little opportunity to question the wider impacts of this work.

In a letter to CEO, Commissioner Potočnik justified the dominance of industry saying: "European Technology Platforms have been conceived as a means to help realise the Lisbon Strategy. The platforms can play a key role in better incorporating industry's needs into EU research priorities by bringing together stakeholders, led by industry, to define a Strategic Research Agenda and to suggest possible directions for its implementation. This is the underlying rationale for the deliberate industrial focus of technology platforms, which was indeed, as you note correctly, reflected in BIOFRAC and is also manifest in the composition of the Biofuels Technology Platform."

The problem with targets

The European Commission is already pushing an agrofuel target of 10% by 2020.[4], much to the alarm of environmental and poverty campaigners. The vast majority of NGOs working on the issue have condemned the target because of the damaging social and environmental consequences and in April 2008 the European Environment Agency’s Scientific Body [5] called for the target to be dropped. International bodies including the UN and IMF have warned on the impact of agrofuels on food supplies.

A wide range of studies, including some from the EU’s own Joint Research Committee (JRC), have highlighted problems around the impacts of agrofuels – including the impact on food production and prices already being seen, the problems created for small landowners and workers in producer countries and the damage to the environment.

Research has shown that large scale changes in land use will be needed to grow agrofuels, and that doing so will result in an increase in greenhouse gas emissions exacerbating climate change instead of mitigating it. Agrofuels are not a sustainable form of energy – and many question whether they ever can be so.

But the EBFTP has ignored these concerns – raised by many in response to the consultation – and
proposed increasing the target to 25%.

Campaigners outside the stakeholder meeting, angered by the proposed target, greeted delegates with a banner saying: “Agrofuels – no solution for oil addiction” and handed out popcorn from a petrol pump. With food prices already rising as farmers switch from growing food to growing fuel, how, they asked, can an increase in agrofuel production be justified?

Civil society groups, including Corporate Europe Observatory, Friends of the Earth Europe, WDM and the Transnational Institute, also wrote to Commissioner Potočnik ahead of the SRA stakeholder meeting to condemn the role of the EBFTP.[6] Why, they asked, should this undemocratic body – which effectively excluded the input of all those who did not support the call for a 25% target – be allowed to determine the EU’s research agenda or hold such influence?

Sustainability on the agenda?

Inside the meeting, the issue of sustainability was less prominent – although many of the speakers seemed keen to show that it was an issue they were aware of. Martin Kaltschmitt of the German Institute for Energy and Environment referred to sustainability as “a critical, very emotional issue”.

Using non-food crops, such as jatropha, was put forward as one solution by Harri Turpeinen from Finnish transport fuel company Neste Oil. His company’s aim was “to get out of the food chain,” he said. “We are completely in line with the tune of the demonstrators outside the building,” he added, completely ignoring the social and environmental threats posed by large scale jatropha plantations, which are as damaging as any other form of monoculture.

“Sustainability indicators” and “sustainability criteria” were put forward as essential to allow
industry to show the wider world that what they are producing is acceptable. But the sustainability criteria used by European Commission – outlined by Ariane de Dominicis, from DG Environment – will not guarantee any degree of sustainability – they fail to take account of the big picture concerns around land and resource use (the displacement effect) and ignore many of the environmental impacts, such as the effect on water and soil.

Monitoring future land use patterns and food prices is like waiting for the patient to die before the doctor is called.

Many of the so-called solutions being put forward by industry – such as the use of GM technology to produce more efficient crops and “second generation biofuels” – raise even more environmental and social concerns.

Ulrich Schuur, Director of the Institute Phytosphere in Germany shared his vision of how genetically modified plants could allow improvements in germination or increase the rate of photosynthesis for example.

Some in the audience were left to wonder whether GM plants – rejected as a food source by many
European consumers – be allowed to spread across the countryside for use as fuel?

José Manuel Silva, Head of DG Research warned that industry must learn the lessons of the GM
debate. “We cannot repeat other cases, like GMOs, where the debate happened after the research actually started,” he said.

Ralph Sims from the International Energy Agency was one of the few to sound a note of caution, warning that scientists had been talking about second generation biofuels since the 1970s but there were no guarantees that they would ever materialise at a low production cost.

“Put stricter speed limits on the highways,” he said. “It’ll cost nothing and you’ll get huge
greenhouse gas reductions.”

Industries’ Dream

But for many speakers at the stakeholder event, technology was the way to improve the efficiency
and sustainability of agrofuels. Markku Karlsson from the Finnish wood and paper company UPM Kymmene, illustrated new ways of exploiting biomass
residues and waste for ethanol.

Dirk Carrez from the Technology Platform for Sustainable Chemistry (SusChem) showed how in the United States, energy efficiency and renewable energy research funding from the Department of Energy is being used to support a
range of companies working in agriculture, transport, biotechnology and the chemicals industry.

In effect, European funding is providing an opportunity for the oil and petrochemical industries to diversify into new areas.

As Swedish MEP Lena Ek said at the opening of the event: “The market is there. Market potential is huge for the industry.”

Although without a European target, the market would not be there – as in the current market place agrofuels cannot compete with fossil fuels in terms of price.

The EBFTP in fact represents a no risk strategy for industry – persuade the European Union to create guaranteed demand and then persuade them to partly fund the costs of developing new products to meet this demand.

Potočnik’s support

Having set up the EBFTP and encouraged industry’s involvement, Commissioner Potočnik seems prepared to ignore all criticism, however well-supported by evidence.

In his reply

to campaigners, he did not even respond on the key issue of the 25% target and did not address questions regarding the fundamental sustainability of agrofuels, accepting wholesale EBFTP’s
reassurances that technology can solve any problems they face.

He also said he was reassured by the open and transparent process adopted by EBFTP, despite the limited involvement of civil society – and despite the EBFTP’s failure to listen to concerns raised by many people in the consultation exercise.

Indeed many campaigners see involvement in the EBFTP process as futile – and for that reason have chosen not to become official stakeholders. Despite its claims, industry is not interested in considering whether agrofuels can ever be sustainable – it wants to create security for investors. Concerns, it wants us to believe, can be overcome with the power of science. The only real concern is the need to ensure that public opinion does not turn against them – which again (as with GMOs) they seem to think they can achieve by a selectively promoting some of the science and promising greater technological improvements for the future.

In whose interest?

The Commission is spending public money on agrofuel research, providing private interests with a Platform to ‘advise’ how this money should be spent. Seizing this opportunity, industry has proposed a research agenda based on an absurd 25% agrofuel blending target by 2030.

The European Commission says that it is “not in any way bound by the views, results or recommendations arising from the activities of any of the technology platforms”, yet previous evidence suggests it is only too willing to listen to what they have to say.[7] There needs to be a public debate on the role being played by technology platforms.

Corporate Europe Observatory and others are calling on Commissioner Potočnik and the rest of the European Commission to face up to the problems agrofuels cause and impose a moratorium on agrofuel targets – including the target of 10%.

The EBFTP should be dissolved. Research priorities should be determined through discussion between stakeholders without commercial interests, and must not be allowed to be at the expense of societies outside the EU. Research on the real impacts of new fuels, on developing sustainable electric transport systems, and on the relation between trade liberalisation and increased transport demands would all be good places to start.

Notes

Strategic Research Agenda & Strategy Deployment Document, European Biofuels Technology Platform, January 2008.
WWF and the European Environment Bureau (EEB).
For more detailed information on BIOFRAC and the EBFTP see The
EU’s agrofuel folly: policy capture by corporate interests,
Briefing paper, Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), June 2007.
Proposal for a
directive on the promotion of the use of energy from renewable sources, European Commisison, 23 January 2008.
Suspend 10 percent biofuels target, says EEA's scientific advisory body, press release, European Environmental Agency, 10 Apr 2008
For the full correspondence between CEO and Commissioner Potočnik
see:
- Corporate Europe Observatory, Letter to Commissioner Potočnik, 1 June 2007
- Reply Commissioner Potočnik, 27 June 2007
- Corporate Europe Observatory and others, Letter to Commissioner Potočnik, 15 January 2008
- Reply Commissioner Potočnik, 28 February 2008.
The car lobby for example has successfully blocked a proposed restriction of 120g/km CO2

Snouts in the Trough... but not yet

Ellie Keen — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 23:03:18 +0000

Since the partial exclusion of health care from the liberalisation of services brought about by the EU's notorious directive of 2005, we have been waiting with some trepidation for the European Commission to make its next move.

To this writer - and I hope also to his readers - a functioning, efficient, equitably funded and affordable system of health care is the absolute fundamental of a civilised society.

Others look at health care through different eyes, of course.

Here is a multi-billion pound industry the widespread public ownership of which means one less well-swilled trough into which piggy can stick his snout.

And since this figurative individual (and my apologies to real pigs, whose treatment at the hands of the EU is even worse than our own) is the one dearest to the European Commission's heart, it was only a matter of time before the Eurocrats sought to ensure that the weakly-worded, unconvincing health care exclusion found its way into the clinical waste bin of history.

So where is the Commission's proposal on the liberalisation of health care services, which we were, in the end, promised for last November?

It was the European Parliament, which increasingly vies with it in its enthusiasm to do corporate capital's bidding, which last May called on the Commission to reintroduce health services into the Services Directive.

In a report described even by social democrats as "a total catastrophe", it was proposed that health care be robbed of its 'privileged' position as an essential service.

The Parliament wants to see an unrestricted patient mobility across the EU's internal borders, which it is well aware would make publicly-owned and collectively-financed health care services untenable.

It wants the Commission to enable codification of European Court of Justice case law applying to the mobility of services.

This would ensure that internal market rules, the freedom to provide services and free movement all apply to health services, and that these principles are put beyond doubt.

In fact, the Commission's work programme for 2007 already contained such a proposal, but the Parliament wanted action.

Its report was an attempt to cajole the Commission into smuggling health care services back into the Services Directive.

This would do nothing to address the real problems of Europe's health care services, which to one degree or another reflect those of the NHS.

Patient mobility may have a role to play, but only if it forms part of a coordinated system of resource pooling based on principles of efficiency and, where appropriate, solidarity.

Collectively-funded health services which are free at point of care - such as almost all NHS treatment - are financed nationally and will remain so for any foreseeable future.

Patient mobility must not be allowed to undermine such services.

EU regulations on the coordination of social protection schemes already deal with many of the real problems arising from cross-border patient mobility, though they have clearly been found wanting when it comes to lining the pockets of private health care providers.

Supplying a high quality and efficient health care infrastructure where people live is, in any case, a much better way to avoid waiting lists for treatment.

Dutch left MEP Kartika Liotard, who initiated the amendment which led to the exclusion of health care from the Services Directive, says that "what we definitely do not need is another bogus 'balanced compromise' of the Service Directive type. We demand that health services and social services, in common with all public services and services of general interest, be excluded from internal market and competition rules. High quality health care for all is not a commodity, but a public good."

Adding that her views had found support from MEPs across the political spectrum, she says that she was "shocked" to see the issue return.

"We fought extremely hard to keep health care services out of the scope of the services directive" says Liotard. "Health care is much too important to allow it to be exposed to unrestrained market forces."

So does the delay to the European Commission proposal mean that Liotard's arguments may have prevailed?

Only, unfortunately, in our dreams.

What the hold-up really means is that the Commission, along with all who support the top-down integration of Europe and its transformation into a paradise for corporate capital, are well aware that health care liberalisation will prove about as popular as toothache.

And while this unpopularity is not going to change, the liberalisers are prepared to wait until the most sweeping liberalising measure of all, the renamed European Constitution, is approved by all of the national parliaments and the only electorate which will be allowed to have its say, the Irish.

"EU member state citizens are not expecting still more liberalisation, and certainly not in health care," Kartika Liotard explains. "The Commission is afraid that resistance to this will throw a spanner in the works when it comes to ratification of the reform treaty. The public would then for once find out the full extent of the EU plans, and perhaps they would also become more critical of the new 'constitution'." Far from welcoming the postponement, she describes it as "simply scandalous" and "evidence of a lack of political courage.".

Heavy political pressure from the Commission has already ensured that after Ireland no other member state will hold a referendum on the reform treaty. "But," Liotard says, "evidently there is still disquiet and a feeling that until the treaty is finally ratified any proposals which might prove controversial should remain out of sight. This is typical of this Europe: keep everyone sweet until the ink is dry on all of the signatures and then get on with unpopular, far-reaching measures which have long been planned."

Steve McGiffen edits Spectrezine. This article was written for the Morning Star