Ireland's landscape, and the world's, looks set to be changed radically by our pursuit of biofuels, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
The current buzz about biofuels as a way to cut our greenhouse gas emissions clouds one overwhelming fact - an awful lot of land will be consumed to grow the rapeseed and giant miscanthus (elephant grass) needed to produce them.
The fact is that the Government's latest target to replace 10 per cent of Ireland's petrol and diesel consumption by 2020 with biofuels such as ethanol would require the conversion of almost all of the tillage land in the State to grow these raw materials.
Announcing the new biofuel targets on Monday, Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources Noel Dempsey said they would achieve carbon savings of over 700,000 tonnes a year as early as 2009 - equivalent to taking almost 200,000 cars off the road.
"This decision represents a long-term commitment by Government to the development of a biofuels market in Ireland," he said. It is being backed by a €6 million grants scheme, under which farmers will get €80 per hectare on top of an existing €45 EU biofuels premium.
Dempsey's announcement trumped Fine Gael's private member's Bill - which would require a biofuel blend for all petrol and diesel vehicles - in the Dáil this week. The Bill aimed to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and create a "viable alternative enterprise for Irish farmers".
Fine Gael environment spokesman Fergus O'Dowd said blending ethanol with petrol and rapeseed oil with diesel - even at low levels initially - would help Ireland to meet its Kyoto Protocol target and reduce the bill (currently €270 million) for purchasing carbon credits abroad.
There is no doubt that a switch to biofuels would make a contribution to cutting CO2 emissions from Ireland's transport sector, which have risen by 160 per cent over the past 15 years with the massive increase in the number of cars and heavy goods vehicles on our roads.
But an interim target of 5.75 per cent for biofuels by 2010 would require the conversion of more than half of the 400,000 hectares (960,000 acres) of tillage land. Traditional crops such as wheat and barley would give way to luminous yellow rapseed and tall, waving miscanthus.
ACHIEVING THE TARGET of 10 per cent by 2020 would consume 375,000 hectares (900,000 acres), - or nearly all of the tillage land available - if it was to be met from indigenous sources alone, otherwise we would have to import biofuels, just as we import oil, coal and gas today.
Some grazing land might be converted to biofuel production, which would be good for the climate because it would cut methane emissions from cattle and sheep. Emissions from agriculture fell by nearly 2 per cent in 2005, mainly due to declining herd numbers.
In the US, where president George Bush is now big on biofuels, corn on the cob is rapidly being replaced by "fuel on the cob". Indeed, biotech companies such as Monsanto are marketing new strains of "designer corn" genetically engineered for the production of ethanol.
But even if all of the farmland in the US was dedicated to corn and soybean production for biofuels, it would meet only 12 per cent of the country's demand for petrol and 6 per cent of its diesel demand, according to agro-ecologist Prof Miguel Altieri of the University of California.
What's likely to happen is that biofuel crops such as sugar cane, palm oil and soybean will be grown for the US on large-scale plantations that "are already replacing primary and secondary tropical forests and grasslands in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Malaysia".
Writing in the Berkeley Daily Planet earlier this month (with Eric Holt-Gimenez, director of Food First, an activist think tank), Prof Altieri said hundreds of thousands of peasant farmers "are being displaced by soybean expansion and many more stand to lose their land under the biofuels stampede".
So far, according to their lengthy article, soybeans have already led to the destruction of over 91 million acres of forests and grasslands in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia. "To satisfy world market demands, Brazil alone will need to clear 148 million additional acres of forest".
AND THERE'S THE rub. The Amazon rainforest is one of the Earth's great storehouses of carbon. If more of its trees are felled to clear land for biofuel production, any gains in reducing the use of fossil fuels - and thereby greenhouse gas emissions - will be offset by this loss.
According to Biofuelwatch, a London-based campaign group, Indonesia plans a 43-fold increase in its palm oil production by 2025. This would bring the total area converted for this crop, mostly from rainforest, to 26 million hectares (62 million acres) - an area larger than Britain.
Earlier this month, more than 160 environmental, development and social organisations called on the EU to rethink its target of 5.75 per cent for biofuels in transport by 2010 because of the damage they are causing to forests, habitats and communities in Third World countries.
"The EU Biofuels Directive puts 20 million hectares [ 48 million acres] of rainforest in Indonesia at extreme risk", they warned. "If destroyed, and its associated peatland is drained, this could release 50 billion tonnes of carbon - the equivalent of six years of current levels of carbon emissions."
Biofuelwatch co-founder Jim Roland said: "What we see being played out is 'ecological Macbeth', in which basic environmental objectives are being betrayed and savaged by western leaders' pat solutions" - notably the EU's own target of halting biodiversity loss worldwide by 2010.
But there's no shortage of cheerleaders for biofuels, including Ibec's Irish BioIndustry Association. In a statement last month, it said biotechnology (ie, genetic engineering) "offers very significant advantages for increasing the efficiency of biofuel production".
HAILING THE NEWS that 105 million hectares (252 million acres) of biotech crops were grown last year in 22 countries, director Marian Byron said: "Ireland, with its strong agriculture and emerging biofuel industry, is well-placed to take advantage of the opportunities offered by plant biotechnology."
On Monday, the Department of Transport and the German-Irish Chamber of Commerce will launch a "biofuels for transport" initiative, which should see 50 buses converted to run on plant oil by the end of this year. It's a small step - but is it really in the right direction?
www.biofuelwatch.org.uk