EU biofuels policies are fuel hunger, says ActionAid

The leading Non Governmental Organisation (NGO), ActionAid, says that the European Union’s biofuels policies are fuelling land grabs in developing countries and increasing hunger amongst the poor. ‘Who’s Really Fighting Hunger?’ the NGO’s freshly released report, warns that generous subsidies and tax breaks to biofuels producers could push up the price of staple food by as much as 15 per cent by 2020. It calculates that an additional 30-40 million hectares of land will be needed by 2020 to meet the EU’s demands for biofuels, half of which will be in developing countries. “EU companies have already acquired or requested at least 5 million hectares of land for industrial biofuels in developing countries – an area greater than the size of Denmark,” reads an ActionAid press release.“EU leaders have broken their promises to the world’s poor by pushing policies that leave people, farmers and workers, without land and food,” says ActionAid’s campaigns manager, Laura Sullivan just days ahead of the Millennium Development Goals Review Conference, 20-22 September in New York. The target of halving hunger by 2015 is Millennium Goal One. “Recent food riots are a sharp reminder that poor countries cannot rely on unstable global food markets. Investing in local farms where the world’s hungry live is the best way to avert another food crisis,” adds Joanna Kerr, ActionAid’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO). The report cites 20 out of 28 poor nations off-track to halve hunger by 2015 including 12 who are moving in reverse. It scores both developing nations and donors to developing nations on their policies to reduce hunger. Two African countries, Ghana and Malawi, are top of the list of developing nations. Malawi has reduced the number of people living on food hand outs from 1.5M to 150,000 in just five years. EU member states Luxembourg, France, Spain and Sweden are all at the top of the donor nations having pledged agricultural aid to help fight the 2009 food crisis. To view the full report: http://tiny.cc/AAMDGReport