EU s biofuel vacillation
In the first week of April, EU's Scientific Committee called for the suspension of the region's biofuel targets citing food crisis and unavailability of arable land. But on April 21, EU officials stated that the union stood by its target of getting 10 per cent of its road transport fuel from crops and biomass by 2020. EU's Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said that "strict conditions have been set to prevent social harm'. EU is considering promotion of second general biofuels largely from domestic and industrial waste, not food crops.
In fact, UK's prime minister, Gordon Brown, prime minister has called for a meeting to discuss the EU policy of encouraging biofuel. Brown said that "UK should be more selective in supporting biofuel which converts cereals into fuel'. But other countries are going full-steam with biofuel programmes. The US, for example, has mandated the use of 28.4 billion litres of biofuel for transportation by 2012. According to the World Bank, almost all of the increase in global maize production between 2004 and 2007 went for bio fuel production in the US while existing stocks were depleted by an increase in consumption for other purposes like animal feed.