Brussels, April 14 - Europeans should not fear a fall in food supplies caused by the European Union's ambitious targets for using biofuels in transport fuels, the EU's executive Commission said on Monday.
Last year, EU leaders agreed to get 10 percent of all transport fuel from biofuels by 2020 to help fight climate change. Ministers are now debating how to reach the goal and avoid trade-offs such as diverting land from food production.
Concern over meeting the biofuels targets has fuelled fears that sky-high food prices, which have already led to riots in developing countries, may rise even further if fertile arable land in Europe is turned over to growing "energy crops". "We see that we don't have an enormous danger of too much of a shift away from food production towards biofuels production," European Commission agriculture spokesman Michael Mann told a daily news briefing.
"We have increasing yields, we are getting rid of set-aside," he said, referring to a longstanding EU system of farmers compulsorily leaving a certain amount of land fallow each year. That amount has already been set at zero for this harvest and is scheduled for abolition, if EU ministers agree.
"We have the move towards second-generation (biofuels) ... and we also have in a number of the new member states ... huge amounts of land that have previously been unplanted. This can be brought into production," he said.
First generation biofuels usually come from food crops such as wheat, maize, sugar or vegetable oils. They require energy-intensive inputs like fertiliser, which make it difficult to cut the emissions of gases contributing to climate change.
They rank as one the main factors blamed by experts for the surge in food prices, particularly in countries like the United States, where nearly all of the rise in global maize production from 2004 to 2007 went to biofuels.
In Europe, by contrast, biofuels are still a fledgling and marginal industry and overall supply should remain bolstered by imports, the Commission says.
"If we move towards second-generation (biofuels) and we put all this extra land back into production, we are talking about a very small share of our arable land and crops being used for biofuels," Mann said.
Second generation biofuels would use non-food products such as straw and waste lumber. So far, their production has been mostly experimental.