(Bio)Fueling Injustice? - Europafrica

or animal feed is turned over to growing agrofuels which displaces the original
land use into new areas- caused by biofuels questions their environmental benefits,
and thus the main rationale for supporting them.
The EU and EU Member States’ incoherence with their
development policies and disregard for their human rights
obligations
The EU has advanced a number of arguments to defend its biofuel policy. However,
none of them withstand confrontation with the evidence presented above. The
monitoring and bi-annual reporting on social issues proposed in the RED is a useful
tool, but it is only reactive and cannot prevent violations. Moreover, it is not acceptable
for the EU to adopt an essentially technical approach to assessing the impacts
of the RED, ignoring all reports from affected people and civil society, to justify
not taking action. Instead of reviewing the facts with a highly optimistic perspective
and placing the burden of proof on civil society organisations, the EU ought to
undertake a comprehensive and objective analysis of the effects of its policies in terms
of the environment, food security, development and human rights. And WTO rules
cannot constitute an excuse to precipitate thousands of people into hunger.
Although the FAO, the World Bank and a number of other international organisations,
in a joint report to the G20, have recommended removing provisions of current
policies that subsidize or mandate biofuel production or consumption because of their
impact on food price volatility, the EU still seems to deny any negative impact. There is
no doubt that the biofuel issue requires a cautious approach, given the difficulties in
assessing their impacts and their theoretical benefits. It is also clear that their negative
social impacts are largely unintended and unwanted effects of an otherwise valuable
policy. However, the EU has failed thus far to respond to the rising evidence of
the problematic impacts of its biofuel policy on African societies.
This lack of adequate response has led the EU and its member states to infringe
two principles they are bound to respect: policy coherence for development
(PCD) and human rights.
In terms of PCD, the social effects of the EU biofuel policy in Africa contradict the
objectives of EU development cooperation, breaching article 208 of the Treaty on
the Functioning of the European Union. In its 2010 policy framework to assist
developing countries in addressing food security challenges, the EU recognised the
crucial role of smallholders to achieve this aim. Acknowledging that secure access to
land is a prerequisite for higher productivity of smallholder farmers, the EU and its
Member States were enjoined to help ensure that policies on agriculture, land and
biofuels address this concern, including through support to the implementation of the
African Union land policy guidelines.
Yet, whereas the EU aims at encouraging sustainable small-scale family farming to
enhance food security and at improving democratic governance of natural resources,
its biofuel policy promotes large-scale industrial farming that threatens the right to
food. The EU is therefore jeopardizing, on the one hand, what it supports through its
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