The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSP has posted the following to their website.  I have seen several articles lately on this topic and thought you might be interested in an opinion from the UK.

A new madness

Before Christmas, the Prime Minister delivered the most powerful and comprehensive speech yet heard from a head of government on climate change. Such commitment gives real cause for hope.

But in the urgent desire ‘to do something’, care must be taken that actions are based on logic and evidence. Some of the avenues which have rightly been explored seem to us to be dead ends.

One of these is the rush to grow biofuels. Using huge areas of land to grow plants for fuel rather than for food will have harmful impacts on the world’s hungry, but on environmental grounds, biofuels don’t add up either.

As time goes on, the evidence grows that the carbon savings from the current generation of biodiesel and bioethanol have been over-estimated and that the net benefits will at best be small. In some cases, the production of biofuels will have exactly the opposite effect of that claimed, increasing greenhouse gas emissions and accelerating climate change. 

The world seems to have gone biofuels mad! Across the US, biofuel production plants are springing up that will be able to process more corn than the US can grow. UK and EU policy is now adding to the demand, increasing the price of crops across the world and encouraging more rainforest destruction, more ploughing up of grassland and more drainage of wetlands. It is utter folly to destroy ecosystems that are bursting with life and storing carbon so that biofuel crops, such as palm oil, can be grown. 

But in the urgent desire ‘to do something’, care must be taken that actions are based on logic and evidence.

Global competition between food and fuel crops for land is pushing up commodity prices and these affect the countryside around us. When wheat prices are very high, farmers are less keen to enter wildlife-friendly farming schemes and less keen to have environmental restraints put on their businesses. 

Farmers pushed for set-aside to disappear early from the countryside because of the high price of cereals and governments across Europe were happy to oblige, without taking any steps to replace the environmental value that set-aside has provided since 1989. 

In the UK, farmers’ leaders have led government ministers to believe that the countryside will change little as a result of this policy shift. This seems unlikely – we already have reports of set-aside that has existed for years being ploughed up and we fear that the predictions of farmers’ leaders will not be met. The decline in farmland bird populations has been levelling off, in part because of set-aside. Without it, or compensatory measures, numbers may well tumble further. 

The wrong-headed rush to grow biofuels across the world, driven by government policy, will have serious impacts on the birds you see on your walk in the countryside, and on amazing tropical wildlife, from tigers to hornbills.

It doesn't make sense from an economic perspective. It can only exacerbate world hunger. And, for now at least, it provides no meaningful answer to climate change. A rapid change of policy is needed – not just tinkering – before this new form of madness does incalculable damage.

Graham Wynne, chief executive of the RSPB

 

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