Brazil Lashes Out over Biofuel Restrictions

European Union regulations are hitting the biofuels industry, and some countries are finding it difficult to maintain the new standards. Brazil has launched an attack on the EU’s measures for the biofuel feedstock certification process which could hamper Brazil’s biofuel exports.

The EU’s Renewable Energy Directive, which will become effective in December, requires ethanol and biodiesel to meet substantial carbon dioxide reduction emissions levels as well as measures minimizing deforestation. Brazil is expanding its sugarcane production in three states outside the Amazon, taking over pasteurized land.

However, Brazil argues that unlike the UK and other areas in Europe, it has plenty of land with deforestation in the Amazon slowing since 2005, according to Robert Michael Boddey, an expert for Brazil’s governmental agency EMBRAPA. General Coordinator for sugar and alcohol for Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture Cid Caldas told local news sources that sugarcane plantations were only permitted on 8% of the country’s land.

The government is implementing an incentive program, valued at about $2 billion, to promote agricultural development that will use 15 million hectares of degraded pastures over the next 10 years. In addition, the project will attempt to expand a crop rotation system which will alternate crops and cattle over four million hectares.

Environmentalist Marcel Gomes claimed that the US and EU hide behind their “environmental barriers.” He said that these restrictions were only an effort to prevent entry of a product that had comparative advantages as high oil prices shifted the energy demand toward maize-based ethanol. Heavily subsidized in the US, maize prices also spiked. He added, “There could be fear that the technology of Brazilian biofuels could be exported to Africa or Mexico, and threaten both European and US farmers.”