Biofuels offer potential for UK farmers

Biofuels are green, renewable, environmentally friendly and good. Fossil fuels are black, finite, polluting and bad.

If we all pump biofuels into our cars and shun fossil fuels then global warming will slow down and the world will be a better and greener place.

It is a clear, simple yet totally inaccurate message – the biofuels market is far more complex.

However, it does present a huge opportunity for British farmers.

The EU has a directive on the promotion of renewable energy which asks every member state to ensure 10 per cent of its entire transport fuel comes from a renewable source by 2020.

The UK has been pretty slow out of the blocks, but it is now up and running and has a target of 3.25 per cent of its transport fuel to come from renewable sources this year alone.  

But it would be wrong to assume the world will be a better and greener place if these targets are met.

It comes down to a problem familiar to British farmers: the inability to verify the standards of our imports.

According to latest figures from the Renewable Fuels Agency (RFA) 80 per cent of the feedstock used to produce biofuel for British vehicles between April and May this year were produced abroad.

At least three quarters of these imports, mostly from Brazil and Argentina, failed to meet any certifiable environmental standards.

At worst the fuels could have come from deforested land and at best the farmers in Latin America simply haven’t had to jump through the same hoops as their EU counterparts to verify their crops.

Whichever way you look it seems unfair.

But there is a significant chink of light for UK farmers – the EU is set to introduce mandatory sustainability criteria on biofuels in December this year.

Farmers in the UK producing genuine green fuel made from wheat, sugar beet, oilseed rape and many other types of innovative feedstock will certainly benefit.

According to the RFA most domestically produced biofuels are ‘environmentally sustainable’ and deliver greenhouse gas savings of at least 44 percent against fossil fuels.

The UK farming industry has high verifiable standards and huge potential to help meet EU targets on biofuels and renewable energy.