18/12/2008 Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development
Strasbourg, 18.12.2008 – “The large-scale production of plants such as wheat, maize or sugar cane to manufacture agrofuels is not a miracle solution to cope with the alarming reduction in fossil energy. On the contrary, it might even, as has happened in South America, cause a major price increase in agricultural products for human consumption, thus jeopardising access to food,” declared Nigel Evans (United Kingdom, EDG), member of the Committee on the Environment, who wrote a report on “Growing food and fuel.”
In a draft resolution adopted today, the Environment Committee urged member states and the European Commission to take better account in their energy and agriculture policies, of the damaging effects on the environment, agriculture and food, if the development of agrofuels is taken too far (in some cases agrofuels are producing even more greenhouse gas than the fossil fuels they are supposed to replace).
The Rapporteur considers that, above and beyond the ecological concerns, the central problem is access to land and the famine risk in certain regions of the world: it is estimated that the quantity of cereals needed to fill a lorry’s tank with agrofuel could feed one person for a whole year.