1. What are biofuels and what are they used for?
2. Are there good and bad biofuels?
3. Where are we getting them from?
4. Don’t biofuels have great potential to generate jobs and income?
5. What role are biofuels playing in causing hunger?
6. But aren’t biofuels a solution to climate change?
7. What are ‘second' and ‘third’ generation biofuels? Can they tackle climate change?

8. If we’re not using biofuels then what are the alternatives for tackling climate change?
9. If biofuels are so bad why are the UK government even considering supporting them?
10. Does ActionAid have a problem with the EU’s renewable energy targets themselves?
11. Why is ActionAid targeting Sun Biofuels?
12. What is happening with Sun Biofuels and the communities of Kisarawe now?
13. Why are we asking Andrew Mitchell to speak out on biofuels?
14. Why has ActionAid made the DriveAid video?

Current biofuels are fuel made from agricultural crops (like wheat, maize, palm oil, sugar cane and jatropha) or wastes (such as cooking oil). Whilst they are sometimes burnt in power plants to produce heat and electricity, in the UK they are more commonly mixed with petrol and diesel to fuel our cars.

Did you know that 3.5% of all UK petrol and diesel is already made up of biofuel? So whether you’re on the bus or in your car, you have no choice but to burn biofuel.

Some biofuels – those produced from genuine wastes that would otherwise be disposed of, discarded or lost – can be produced as a sustainable form of energy. These might include used cooking oil, food waste or off-gassing from landfill. However, these biofuels cannot be produced on a big enough scale to meet the energy targets of rich nations.

Instead, agribusiness in rich countries has invested millions of pounds in producing biofuels from agricultural crops on an industrial scale. Despite being sold by industry as green, environmentally friendly and sustainable, mounting scientific evidence has emerged to expose these first-generation, industrial biofuels as disastrous for both poor people in developing countries and the environment.

Currently, 84% of all biofuels imported to the UK are grown in Europe, South-East Asia, the US and South America. If the UK government sets new biofuel targets which increase the amount of biofuel in our petrol and diesel, the proportion of biofuels coming from developing countries will also have to increase substantially.

In theory, biofuels can bring development to poor countries where biofuel crop production can provide rural development and greater opportunities for those trapped in poverty. In practice however, as soon as rich nations set ambitious targets for increased biofuel consumption they provided an incentive for foreign biofuels companies to grab land across the developing world.

EU companies have already acquired or requested at least five million hectares of land for industrial biofuels in developing countries – an area greater than the size of Denmark.

The local impacts of this neo-colonial biofuel scramble have been devastating. Often without consultation or compensation, vulnerable communities are losing their land to foreign biofuel companies.

These cases of displacement are affecting people’s access to vital natural resources; water is being diverted away from wells and into irrigating the biofuel crop, and villagers are no longer able to enter forests which have sustained them for generations. Biofuel companies are also routinely breaking promises they make to communities to provide local improvements and jobs.

Industrial biofuels are making it harder for people to make ends meet and feed themselves and their families.

The rising demand for crops for fuel has put them in direct competition with crops for food over land, natural resources (like water) and fertilisers. With food staples increasingly being burnt to go in our cars instead of being used to feed the world’s hungry, the price of food is being pushed up.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, increased demand for industrial biofuels will be responsible for a third of the rise in agriculture prices foreseen for the next ten years. For poor families in the developing world, who can spend as much as 80% of their total income on food, even a small rise in the price of staple foods is catastrophic.

If global biofuel targets (including the UK’s) are met then hundreds of millions more people could be forced into hunger by 2020. This is not a theoretical discussion: demand for industrial biofuels was one of the main causes of a spike in food prices in 2008 which pushed an estimated 100 million people into poverty.

The amount of corn required to fill a 4x4 tank with biofuel would feed a child for a year – that’s a staggering 1,000 meals, totalling 40 meals in every gallon.

Industrial biofuels present a false solution to climate change. They are marketed as an innovative, environmentally cleaner alternative to the ‘dirty’ fossil fuels of the past, but they are not living up to that promise. Far from reducing the effects of climate change, the greenhouse gas emissions created by growing, processing, and transporting biofuels means that this ‘green fuel’ is doing far more harm than good.

This is largely due to the ‘land use change’ needed to make way for the vast biofuel plantations popping up all over the developing world.  When carbon-rich habitats such as forests or peatlands are directly cleared to make way for biofuels, huge amounts of greenhouse gasses are released.

Heavy use of fertilisers on the crops releases huge amounts of nitrous oxide, a gas 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

It is the world’s poorest people who are taking the brunt of these policies as the impacts of climate change hit developing countries first, and hardest.

Whereas first-generation biofuels (industrial biofuels) use conventional technology and compete with land and crops for food, second-generation biofuels are made using new technological processes and nonfood crops.

These include biofuels from forestry and agricultural by-products, such as stalks from wheat and maize or wood waste. However, there remain serious doubts as to whether they will ever be commercially viable and their benefits are still being disputed. There are major concerns that land used to grow them would displace food crops and drive deforestation to create more farmland, making climate change worse.

Third-generation biofuels include those made from algae. However, they are still being researched and are nowhere near commercially ready to even be produced let alone to meet our huge energy demands.

Industrial biofuels are an environmental hazard which are diverting much needed political attention and financial support away from genuine ways of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. There are many options available to the government which would not require dramatic changes to peoples' lifestyles. These include:

• Doubling the fuel efficiency of new cars is the biggest single action the EU could implement to reduce transport emissions – this could save 95 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year by 2020 across the EU.
• A 1.5% shift from car to train travel could save 1 million tonnes of CO2 per year; travelling by train produces half the carbon dioxide emissions compared to travelling by car.
• Increasing the number of journeys we take by bike (from 1.5 to 15%) and on foot (from 24 to 36%) could save the UK more than 7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.
• Lowering UK motorway speed limits to 65 MPH and improving speed control measures could reduce UK carbon dioxide emissions by up to 5.4 million tonnes a year (and save lives)
• If UK car commuters left their vehicle at home once a week (perhaps by working at home), we would save 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.
• Increasing the share of rail freight from 11.5% to just 20% could remove 7 million lorry journeys from the road, saving some 2.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.

ActionAid conservatively calculates that these six measures alone could save over 25% of UK transport greenhouse gas emissions (some 33 million tonnes of carbon dioxide) by 2020.

When biofuels were originally presented as the answer to the climate crisis, government and industry alike jumped on the biofuel bandwagon. Despite the wealth of evidence highlighting the human and environmental costs of biofuels, many policy makers are reluctant to remove their support altogether.

This is largely because relying on biofuels to reduce the transport sector’s emissions allows government to fulfil their EU renewable energy commitment, whereby 10% of all petrol and diesel must come from renewable sources by 2020.

Moreover, sticking with industrial biofuels allows rich countries to avoid some urgent and difficult decisions, such as reducing consumption of transport fuels and energy more generally, and forcing companies to invest in cleaner and alternative technology. Industrial biofuels let us continue our love affair with the internal combustion engine while providing the illusion of action from the car and oil industries.

Yes and no. We are passionately in favour of renewable energy targets. But we are against the current transport target as it has become a volume target for biofuels rather than a greenhouse gas reduction target.

Renewable energy must be sourced sustainably, genuinely contribute to fighting climate change and not exacerbate world hunger or increase conflicts over access to land, water and other productive resources. The inability of industrial biofuels to meet any of these conditions should render their potential inclusion under EU targets unacceptable.

The current EU sustainability criteria are too weak and are providing a cloak of acceptability that has enabled unsustainable biofuels to be produced on an industrial scale.

Between 2006 and 2009, Sun Biofuels Ltd, a UK-registered biofuel company, took more than 8,000 hectares of land from 11 villages in Kisarawe, Tanzania, to establish a biofuel plantation. To give you an idea of scale, that’s almost 11,000 full-size football pitches.  

In return for giving up their land, Sun Biofuels promised the local communities that they would pay full compensation for the land they took and build badly-needed social services such as wells, schools and clinics. Not one of these promises has ever been met.  

The communities are now suffering the effects of this land grab. Whether they used the land for farming, gathering firewood and charcoal which they then sold, or gathering medicinal herbs and timber, the majority of villagers relied on the land they lost to make a living. Without this income, many parents can no longer afford to feed their children three meals a day, pay school fees or buy medicine when they’re sick.  

The Sun Biofuels plantation also engulfed a number of the villages’ water sources, but the company did not build the new wells that it promised so people now have to walk for up to four hours a day to collect water.  

Had they known that Sun Biofuels would operate in this way, almost all of the villagers say they would never have agreed to give up their land.  

  >> You can send a message of support to the communities in Kisarawe
  >> To follow the story of the people of Kisarawe and Sun Biofuels, keep an eye on our blog
  >> To stop the biofuel land grab devastating the lives of more communities in poor countries, sign the petition against the huge biofuel targets being set Western governments

In August 2011, like many biofuel companies before them, Sun Biofuels went into administration and fired 650 of its 700 local workers. The company was sold to new owners almost immediately but production on the plantation has not resumed.  

Meanwhile, back in the UK, on Sunday 30th October, The Observer published an expose of Sun Biofuels and highlighted the plethora of promises the company broke to local people, including not paying compensation for the land it took.  

ActionAid UK has now has met with the new owners and we are very hopeful that we can work with them to help the communities of Kisarawe to get justice.  

In Kisarawe, with help from ActionAid Tanzania, the 11 villages have formed a taskforce and have already met with their local government to try and resolve the situation. They have given the new owners until 30th December, after which the communities plan to protest in order to reclaim their rights.  

  >> You can send a message of support to the communities in Kisarawe
  >> To follow the story of the people of Kisarawe and Sun Biofuels, keep an eye on our blog
  >> To stop the biofuel land grab devastating the lives of more communities in poor countries, sign the petition against the huge biofuel targets being set Western governments

Though we have made progress on biofuels campaigning to date and the UK government has acknowledged concerns around the social impacts of biofuels, so far DFID has failed to speak out against biofuels. Therefore we want Andrew Mitchell to take a lead within the UK government and ensure the Department for International Development lives up to its role as a voice of poor people in developing countries by speaking out on the harmful social effects of biofuels.

On the 14 May, the UK Secretary of State for International Development Andrew Mitchell is meeting with development ministers from all over Europe. The European Commission will be reporting on the social impacts of biofuel policy later this year so this meeting is the perfect opportunity for ministers to stand up for people in poor countries by ensuring the Commission acknowledges the full impact of biofuels, and doesn’t brush them under the carpet.

  >> Ask Andrew Mitchell to take a lead on biofuels within Europe and push for the Development Council meeting in May to make a strong public statement against biofuels and call on the EC to fully investigate the damaging social impacts of biofuels policy.

We made the video to highlight the absolute lunacy of biofuels. In an uncomfortable parody of current UK fuel policy it shows campaigners trying to drum up support for a new spoof pro-biofuel campaign called ‘Drive Aid’ which calls for “taking food out of greedy African’s mouths, and putting it into the petrol tanks of our cars”.

We believe that if the British public knew we’re using food for car fuel rather than to eat they would demand a change in policy, so we’re using the video to raise awareness of the issue and drive people to our petition calling for the UK government to end its support for biofuels.