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Warning! Agrofuels could be bad for people and the planet! The past months have seen an unprecedented list of warnings issued by respected bodies. Below is just a selection of the latest... September 2007 "The current push to expand the use of biofuels is creating unsustainable tensions that will disrupt markets without generating significant environmental benefitsİNational governments should cease to create new mandates for biofuels and investigate ways to phase them out." OECD report Biofuels: is the cure worse than the disease? September 2007 "Developing countries face serious social unrest as they struggle to cope with soaring food prices, inflation that shows no signs of abating, the United Nations' top agriculture official has warned. Mr Diouf said although the biofuel industry directly increased the consumption of only a handful of agricultural commodities, such as corn and rapeseed, its effect spread to other food products because less acreage was devoted to non-biofuel crops and the cost of feeding livestock with grain was pushed up." UN warns of food price unrest, Financial Times http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1f0d4c6a-5ca1-11dc-9cc9-0000779fd2ac.html August 2007 "the EU target of ensuring 10% of petrol and diesel comes from renewable sources by 2020 is not an effective way to curb carbon emissions". The World Land Trust writing in Science July 2007 "Increased demand for bio-fuels is causing fundamental changes to agricultural markets that could drive up world prices for many farm products..." OECD-FAO report - Agricultural Outlook 2007-2016 June 2007 "...few biofuels seem to offer much in the way of climate protection or oil security and are a very expensive way of addressing these concerns." The International Transport Forum and OECD Joint Transport Research Centre Round Table June 2007 "...regions like the EU should critically consider whether fostering of imports from regions with sensitive ecosystems and/or support of the export of those regions should be continued...Any aspiration to circumvent the need for reducing the absolute amount of resource consumption by simply substituting non-renewable (minerals) by renewable (biomass) resources is not only bound fail, it will contribute to worsen the global situation and enhance the extinction of the remaining reservoirs of nature...the concrete targets and implementation measures in the [European] Union...should be revisited". Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy May 2007 [The expansion of palm oil in Asia] "...comes with serious social and environmental costs which adversely impact on indigenous peoples, forest-dwellers and the tropical rainforests. Out of the 216 million people in Indonesia it is estimated that 100 million, of which 40 million are indigenous peoples, depend mainly on forests and natural resource goods and services. Large areas of forest lands traditionally used by indigenous peoples have already been expropriated." United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues April 2007 "...transition to liquid biofuels can be especially harmful to farmers who do not own their own land, and to the rural and urban poor who are net buyers of food?this is one of the most significant threats associated with liquid biofuel development and calls for careful consideration by decision-makers...at their worst, biofuel programmes can result in concentration of ownership that could drive the world?s poorest farmers off their land and into deeper poverty." United Nations Energy (includes World Bank and FAO)
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