(Bio)Fueling Injustice? - Europafrica

The EU has various strategic interests in promoting biofuels. These include
diversifying its energy supply and supporting its biofuel industry, which is the biggest in
the world. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that the EU biofuel policy has
a well-intentioned and praiseworthy purpose: improving the environment and
addressing climate change. This is an important goal, and it must be kept in mind that
climate change also has significant social repercussions. Should biofuels be able to
help reach this objective in an environmentally and socially sustainable way, they merit
support. If not, other ways of promoting renewable energy use need to be sought.
Linking EU policies and impacts in Africa: nothing to stop the
EU biofuel policy from driving land grabbing
The cultivation of feedstocks (i.e. agricultural raw material such as maize, palm oil, or
sugar cane) to produce biofuels requires large tracts of land, thereby creating
incentives for land grabbing. Although the RED includes sustainability criteria, which
are minimum standards intending to ensure that biofuels consumed in the EU have a
positive environmental impact, negative social impacts are not prevented. The RED
merely foresees that the social and developmental impacts of the development of
biofuels should be monitored.
The impact of the EU biofuel policy in Africa is still difficult to monitor and to
anticipate. Data is patchy. Many investments took place recently and, therefore, may
take a few years to engender exports to the EU. For this reason, only a method that
crosses different sources of qualitative and quantitative data can give a realistic picture
of the situation.
Adopting such a multi-source approach, evidence reviewed for this report shows that
the EU biofuel policy drives the rush for land in Africa in at least three ways.
First, an increasing amount of African land is being acquired by foreign investors
to produce agrofuels for export to the EU. Cheap African land with purportedly large
potential to grow biofuels is considered by experts and by international investors to be
highly attractive for biofuel production. Many studies, including from the World Bank,
confirm this trend and reliable data shows that between 3 and 5 million ha have
already been directly or indirectly secured by EU companies to grow biofuel feedstock
in Africa.
For various technical reasons, it is very difficult to arrive at a precise figure regarding
biofuel and biofuel feedstock imports to the EU from Africa. Nevertheless, even if
these imports were to be relatively low at the moment, they are growing. It is
anticipated by various sources that the EU could need to rely on over 50% imports to
meet its biofuel needs in the coming years. And as there is no safeguard to ensure that
the EU does not import from Africa, there is no reason to think that the EU will
miraculously escape the general trend of investments in African land for biofuel
exports. The full effect of the current surge of agrofuel investments in Africa will be felt
in several years – if social unrest does not interrupt the projects prematurely.
Second, as a result of the increased demand for biofuels in the EU, some of the land
formerly used to grow food or animal feed in EU Member States is being turned over to
5