Legal action targets EU biofuel policy

European biofuel developers are facing fresh uncertainty about the future of the industry, after four environmental groups yesterday launched legal action against the European Union, accusing it of withholding evidence that allegedly shows that current biofuel policies harm the environment and push up food prices.

The lawsuit, filed on Monday by ClientEarth, Transport & Environment, the European Environmental Bureau and BirdLife International, will result in further investment uncertainty in the biofuel sector, which has faced repeated accusations that it is indirectly contributing to deforestation and failing to deliver expected cuts in carbon emissions.

The lawsuit alleges several violations of European laws on transparency and democracy. The four groups first sought access to documents relating to the EU's biofuel policy on 15 October last year. They allege that the European Commission missed a legal deadline to release all the relevant documents under Freedom of Information (FOI) laws on 9 February. The groups said that while some of the documents have been released, a number have been retained by the Commission in breach of FOI regulations.

Under current EU policies, member states are aiming to produce a tenth of their road fuels from renewable sources such as biofuels by 2020.

However, environmentalists have warned that increased demand for energy crops to make biofuels is pushing up food prices and leading to deforestation to make way for plantations in countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia. Numerous studies have suggested that when the carbon emissions associated with this land use change is taken into account, some biofuels are more carbon intensive than the fossil fuels they are meant to replace.

The EU is working on new rules designed to ensure that only biofuels made from energy crops from sustainable plantations are allowed to count towards its targets. Meanwhile, the biofuel industry has maintained that it is developing second-generation biofuels made from feedstocks that do not eat into agricultural or forested land.

But concerns remain that current EU policies are proving counterproductive, and the new court action comes just days after Reuters disclosed that EU reports and emails released following its own FOI requests reveal concerns within the Commission that the 10 per cent biofuel target was imposed before the environmental impact of that goal was fully assessed.

Some of the released documents suggest EU farms could benefit from higher incomes as a result of biofuels, but they also warn that plant-based biofuels could create food shortages for the world's poorest people.

Critics say that regardless of where they are grown, biofuels compete for land with food crops, forcing farmers worldwide to expand into unfarmed areas. One report suggested that satisfying the EU's demand for biofuels would require 5.2 million hectares of land by 2020.

Together, the released reports reveal for the first time that there was considerable concern among European policymakers about the potential impact of biofuel targets on tropical forests, wetlands and savannah, despite their struggling to quantify the likely damage.

"Current EU biofuels policy guarantees that Europe will use lots of biofuels, but it doesn't guarantee reductions in greenhouse gas emissions – in fact, it seems likely it will make things worse," Nusa Urbancic of transport campaign group T&E told Reuters. "The first step to fixing this broken policy must be full transparency about what the true impacts are."