#Oxfam report exposes EU lobby firepower of biofuel industry behind destructive bioenergy policy

The European Union must overhaul its current bioenergy policy, which is based on getting fuel from plants, because the industry is linked to the eviction of thousands of people from their lands, out-competing food crops, and creating more not less pollution, says Oxfam.

A new Oxfam report today (Tuesday 25 October) says that a powerful industry lobby has captured EU policy and is resisting its reform. The report tracks the impact of this policy and details cases of communities suffering from loss of land and rights abuses in Tanzania, Peru and Indonesia linked to the ever increasing demand from Europe for crops to produce energy.

The EU is due to review its bioenergy policy in a month’s time. It must end the use of biofuels produced from food or energy crops and food by-products, the anti-poverty organisation says.

“In its anxiety to diversify its energy sources and cut fossil fuels, the EU is instead directly and indirectly causing eviction, poverty, hunger – and more, rather than less, carbon emissions,” said report author, Oxfam’s Marc-Olivier Herman. “The EU has unleashed powerful market forces that are leaving a trail of destruction around the planet.”

The policy has fed a forceful machine behind the scenes also. The lobby of European biofuel producers alone is now as financially powerful as the tobacco lobby and employs 121 lobbyists. That means for every civil servant within the European Commission working on the EU’s new bioenergy sustainability policy, the industry has seven lobbyists working to water it down.

According to newest data in the transparency register, all actors of the biofuel value chain together reported spending over €14m and hiring nearly 400 lobbyists in the previous year to influence EU policy. Together with their allies, they line up 600 lobbyists that outnumber the entire staff of the Commission’s Directorate General for Energy.

This lobby is fighting off calls for reform and instead pressuring legislators to expand the policy, which according to estimates is already costing European citizens €5.5bn to €9.1bn every year, while damaging people’s lives, nature and the climate.

The EU is risking to break its international commitments to sustainable development and jeopardizing its commitments to tackle climate change. On average, food-based biofuels emit 50 percent more greenhouse gases than fossil fuels.

The EU policy is putting pressure on lands far beyond Europe’s borders. In 2012, over 40% of the land needed to grow crops for EU energy was outside of Europe. Since then, Europe’s reliance on bioenergy imports has only increased.

Oxfam has sounded the alarm about the increasing number of large-scale land deals and the violence linked to them. Many are linked to the growing demand for energy from plants.

Oxfam has tracked cases from Tanzania, Peru and Indonesia where energy crop and palm oil producers have kicked families off their lands where they lived, farmed, hunted and earned their living.

“Bioenergy companies often have free rein because of weak local laws and weak local authorities that fail to recognize land rights for local communities,” Herman said.

In Bengkulu province on the south-west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, a company at the end of the supply chain of European biofuel producers is barring the access of residents to 1000 hectares of land which the local government had allocated to them. The company is threatening the people, destroying their homes and their land.

“We feel very threatened and disturbed. Our life is there. All of our life’s needs come from those plots of land. Why do they always want to seize them?,” asks a resident of Lunjuk village.

Global demand for palm oil is steadily increasing. The EU is among the world’s top three importers. As available land in South-East Asia diminishes, the industry is aggressively seeking to expand  from Indonesia and Malaysia into new areas such as the Amazon region – palm oil’s new frontier. Again, people are being forced off land they have depended upon for centuries.

“Our lands have been devastated, all the forest is gone, and the streams are completely churned up and blocked. There is now only one stream we can still use for clean drinking water”, says a community leader from the Santa Clara de Uchunya in the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon.

“The EU policy lacks even basic criteria for social sustainability and human rights, making it impossible to bar European biofuel producers from sourcing palm oil lands where communities’ human rights and right to land have been violated and abused,” Herman said.

Oxfam is calling on the EU to invest more instead in energy efficiency and in fuel sources that are genuinely sustainable. It must include indirect carbon emissions from changes in land use as it accounts for its emissions cuts. It also must insist without fail that European bioenergy companies are getting the prior, free and informed consent from local communities in their supply chains.

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