Developing world to become main biofuels benificiary
Good news for the BioPact: experts confirm that the developing world will become the main benificiary of the global boom in biofuels. When it comes to bioenergy, we ourselves, have always stood firm on the logic of green things:
The Financial Times gives the word to Elliott Mannis, chief executive of biodiesel company D1 Oils, adding its own weight to the piece:
Are all biofuels equal? It is a question we need to consider as we respond to the growing need to diversify energy supplies and reduce emissions through adopting renewable fuels. As your recent article on the possible pitfalls of tax incentives for biofuels points out ("Elusive cornucopia: why it will be hard to reap the benefits of biofuel", June 21), converting food crops into fuel may not necessarily offer the expected energy efficiencies and emissions reductions.
Given limited availability of arable land and relatively high agricultural production costs in Europe, we need to assess carefully how much cereal and vegetable oil production is worth diverting from food use to biofuel. If we have to boost production to meet food and fuel demand, what will be the impact of increased use of fossil fuel fertilisers?
Given the high prices of food crops, only large-scale refining with intensive energy use may deliver the economies of scale needed to produce cheap biofuel. Growing non-food crops suitable for burning to generate electricity may make more sense than growing more food crops to refine into fuels. Policy and fiscal incentives should encourage crops that can be produced sustainably and do not require greater carbon emissions and fossil fuel use to convert them into energy.
In the medium term, it is the developing world that should gain from such incentives. The most efficient sources of biofuel available grow in tropical regions: sugar cane for bioethanol; palm and jatropha for biodiesel. As a UK biodiesel producer, our strategy at D1 Oils is based on securing supplies of low-cost vegetable oils from developing countries. We are pioneering jatropha because it is an inedible oil that does not require arable land to produce economic yields. If we can increase production of inedible oils such as jatropha, and ensure that production of palm and soya can be increased sustainably, both the developed and developing world can have access to low-cost supplies of biodiesel with a positive energy balance.
In the long run, second-generation biofuels produced from agricultural waste will enable farmers in the developed world to compete more equally in energy crop production with their counterparts in Africa, India and south-east Asia. Until that time, tariff barriers and subsidy regimes should not deny the world access to the sustainable biofuels that only the developing world can produce competitively.
FT.
Article continues
- the tropics and subtropics have agro-ecological zones that are best suited for efficient biomass production - per hectare, they deliver considerably more biomass than land in more Northern latitudes
- unlike industrialized countries in the North, developing countries have a huge base of unused land (in Central Africa, a mere 5 to 10% of all arable land is currently used)
- likewise, these countries have large rural populations that live in poverty today, with no access to world markets for their cash-crops; the win-win situation is to help them become energy famers, which will lift them out of poverty and which will allow us to use green fuels (with rising oil & gas prices, they're guaranteed an every growing income)
- studies show that, in general, long-distance (intercontinental) trade in biofuels is very viable, since transport costs and CO2 emissions are much lower than one would expect (petroleum is shipped accross the globe too, and since tropical biofuels are cheaper than petroleum, it makes sense for countries in the South to start exporting them)
The Financial Times gives the word to Elliott Mannis, chief executive of biodiesel company D1 Oils, adding its own weight to the piece:
Are all biofuels equal? It is a question we need to consider as we respond to the growing need to diversify energy supplies and reduce emissions through adopting renewable fuels. As your recent article on the possible pitfalls of tax incentives for biofuels points out ("Elusive cornucopia: why it will be hard to reap the benefits of biofuel", June 21), converting food crops into fuel may not necessarily offer the expected energy efficiencies and emissions reductions.
Given limited availability of arable land and relatively high agricultural production costs in Europe, we need to assess carefully how much cereal and vegetable oil production is worth diverting from food use to biofuel. If we have to boost production to meet food and fuel demand, what will be the impact of increased use of fossil fuel fertilisers?
Given the high prices of food crops, only large-scale refining with intensive energy use may deliver the economies of scale needed to produce cheap biofuel. Growing non-food crops suitable for burning to generate electricity may make more sense than growing more food crops to refine into fuels. Policy and fiscal incentives should encourage crops that can be produced sustainably and do not require greater carbon emissions and fossil fuel use to convert them into energy.
In the medium term, it is the developing world that should gain from such incentives. The most efficient sources of biofuel available grow in tropical regions: sugar cane for bioethanol; palm and jatropha for biodiesel. As a UK biodiesel producer, our strategy at D1 Oils is based on securing supplies of low-cost vegetable oils from developing countries. We are pioneering jatropha because it is an inedible oil that does not require arable land to produce economic yields. If we can increase production of inedible oils such as jatropha, and ensure that production of palm and soya can be increased sustainably, both the developed and developing world can have access to low-cost supplies of biodiesel with a positive energy balance.
In the long run, second-generation biofuels produced from agricultural waste will enable farmers in the developed world to compete more equally in energy crop production with their counterparts in Africa, India and south-east Asia. Until that time, tariff barriers and subsidy regimes should not deny the world access to the sustainable biofuels that only the developing world can produce competitively.
FT.
Article continues
Monday, July 03, 2006
Doha is dead, or is it?
The developing countries justifiably believe that the demand from the rich countries is unreasonable. As Robert Wade and various charities, such as Oxfam, point out, virtually no country has managed to industrialise and become "advanced" without protecting its infant industries. The Asian tigers from Japan to South Korea all protected their nascent industrial sector as a prelude to the Asian miracle.
For our biofuels initiative, which seeks to link up communities of energy farmers from the developing world with the world market, this is bad news. The failure to revive Doha means that agricultural subsidies and import tarriffs in the wealthy North remain unchanged.
Yet in this trade round that was supposed to yield benefits to the world's poorer countries, the richer states want to pull the rug from under the developing world.
The recriminations are flying thick and fast, but the EU is emerging as the most culpable party.
John Howard, the Australian prime minister, said Europe and Japan had so far failed to match the more ambitious proposals from the US that would go some way to opening trade in agricultural products across the globe.
"The Americans, to their credit, got the ball rolling, and unless there's an adequate response from the Europeans it won't happen," he told Macquarie radio. "So I still believe that the big stumbling block is the intransigence of the European Union."
That's not how the EU sees it. The EU trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, puts the blame on the US.
"The US says it wants ambition in these talks but, as things stand at the moment, the US is not prepared to pay enough for that ambition."
But the EU stands condemned by findings from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Paris-based thinktank. A recent OECD report found the EU paid its farmers more than $180bn (£97.6bn) worth of protection during 2005 - the most by any developed nation bloc.
The best outcome would be for the rich countries to live up to their pledge to make Doha a real development round by dropping their demands for a cut in industrial tariffs and unilaterally reduce their own farm subsidies. It should be noted, however, that developing countries stand to make much larger gains from less protectionist policies for textiles and other industrial products in OECD countries.
It falls on the long-suffering Pascal Lamy, the head of the World Trade Organisation, to hold more talks to try and hold things together. To that end, there could be talks of the G6 (US, EU, Japan, Brazil, India and Australia) before the G8 summit in St Petersburg, Russia in mid-July.
Today there were signs that the EU may budge. Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European commission, said the EU could make further concessions.
Mr Barroso said he hoped the setback would build pressure for a deal in the next month.
"We still believe it's possible to have a successful outcome of Doha if all parties, the US and the G20 (developing nations) as well, make an effort. The European commission - the European Union because, of course, we need to have the member states with us as well - could do also something more if the others want to move."
While there is much gloom and doom after the failure of the latest round of talks, let's not forget how long it took to conclude the Uruguay round trade talks. It took seven and a half years to finish that set of negotiations, almost twice the original schedule. More countries are taking part in Doha and the issues are even more complicated; that's why it's proving to be such a hard slog.
The Guardian Blog.
Article continues
posted by Biopact team at 11:42 PM 0 comments links to this post